"Striking the proper balance on intellectual property rights" is one of those ideas I put in my conceptual hope chest along with "unilateral elimination of all agricultural subsidies" or "fiscal conservativism" or "NBC renewing Friday Night Lights for another season" as policies I'd really like to see but don't expect to happen.

So, it's a pleasant surprise to read the Economist's tech.view column explain that the Supreme Court actually took a positive step on patent rights:

In a unanimous decision that is being hailed as the most important patent ruling in decades, the Supreme Court early this week swept aside the non-obviousness test used by the appeals court. In its place, a common-sense standard based on real-world conditions is to be applied to all patent applications that combine (as most do) elements of existing inventions.

The case ruled on by the justices concerned an accelerator pedal developed by a Canadian company called KSR. The pedal could be adjusted for a driver’s height and used an electronic sensor, rather than a mechanical cable, to change the engine speed. Teleflex, a rival manufacturer, demanded royalties, claiming the device infringed one of its patents.

KSR argued that Teleflex had combined existing elements in an obvious way, and that its patent was therefore invalid. A district court in Detroit agreed, but the decision was subsequently overturned by the appeals court in Washington, DC. Under the Supreme Court’s new definition of obviousness, Teleflex would have been lucky to get a patent for the pedal in the first place.

The justices’ opinion has been welcomed by the high-tech community. It is impossible to build a laptop, mobile phone or video recorder without infringing dozens of the thousands of patents that cover the various components involved. Computer firms have responded by engaging in a patents arms race and negotiating cross-licensing deals with everyone they expect will be involved.

This is wasteful enough for the Intels, Microsofts and IBMs that can afford such profligate practices. But it can be life or death for smaller, innovative firms. When challenging incumbents’ old-fashioned ways, upstarts like Vonage can find themselves forced out of the market by dubious patent litigation rather than actual competition.

The Supreme Court’s ruling this week will make such anti-competitive practices harder to sustain. Vonage, for one, may be the first of many to seek legal redress from all the shoddy patents endorsed by America’s over-eager courts.