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Comment by xenadu02 | Hacker News Reader

SCOTUS continues its extreme smack-down of the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.

Couldn't happen to a nicer hive of scum and villainy.

It seems inevitable that "specialist courts" become biased towards that specialization.

Patent courts become biased towards patents, spy courts become biased towards spying, trade courts become biased towards more trade/less punishment for companies, and so on.

Interesting. I bet it runs the same way in criminal court -- courts specializing in a particular type of crime would be more likely to rule in favor of the prosecutor in cases concerning that type of crime. (Or did I misunderstand what you were saying?)

Reminds me of an essay written by a civil lawyer who got peripherally involved in a criminal proceeding. tl;dr: Criminal court is a total farce which would be funny except the people going to jail.

Since the Fed Circuit has jurisdiction over the whole country, it makes sense that the SCOTUS overturns it so often. SCOTUS takes cases mostly to either overturn bad decisions or to settle Circuit splits (disagreements between Circuit courts). The later doesn't apply to the Fed. Circuit (very often). SCOTUS wouldn't take a case just to confirm the Fed. Cir.

Nonetheless, in the matter of patent law, it seems to have been ignoring SCOTUS a lot.

There is a history here. The CAFC is (or was) staffed by a bunch of former patent attorneys who never met a patent they didn't like. They're also the bumbling fools who made the idiotic ruling in the Oracle v Google case.

They ignored supreme court precedent in a series of rulings that made patenting abstract concepts possible, something SCOTUS struck down recently. Those CAFC rulings were largely responsible for the "but do it on a computer" patents favored by patent trolls. See Alice/Banks, KSR v Teleflex, and several others.

> They ignored supreme court precedent in a series of rulings that made patenting abstract concepts possible

Oh come on. Have you read that line of cases? They're internally inconsistent and largely nonsensical. The fact that Alice was unanimous is pretty strong evidence that the Supreme Court doesn't know what the fuck they're talking about when it comes to patent law.

I have read those cases. They're nowhere near as inconsistent as you believe them to be. Diamond v. Diehr was a ruling in the time-honored tradition of "let's overturn precedent while extolling how much we're not overturning precedent," but its actual text only pushed the boundaries a little, basically saying "having software doesn't make the thing unpatentable."

It was the CAFC's State St. decision that turned everything to rubbish, basically saying that patentability was a creative writing exercise in showing that you could tie the patent to something concrete, no matter how tenuous that part is to the core patent. In Bilski, SCOTUS went well out of its way to trash State St. at every opportunity. Alice reiterated that decision by making it clear that the machine part can't be an incidental afterthought but must be rather fundamental to the process, reinforcing rather than overturning the ideas in Diamond v Diehr.

Please explain to me how "abstract idea" has anything to do with prior art? Because that's what the Alice analysis actually looks like.

Courts uphold decisions. The Court of Appeals was upholding a previous SCOTUS decision which it has now changed. Nothing smack down about it. They changed their mind. Which is good because now that judge in Texas and his sons can go diddle themselves.

Not according to this article (which I guess could be wrong):

> The Federal Circuit denied the transfer by relying on one of its[i.e., the Federal Circuit's] precedents from 1990.

> ...the high court's own precedent from 1957 held that patent suits are governed by a specific law allowing suits only where defendants are incorporated.

SCOTUS didn't change its mind. It overturned/"smacked down" the Appeals Court's 1990 decision.

That's not what I got from the article. It says the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit based its decision in this case on the precedent set by one of its own previous decisions in 1990, which apparently ran contrary to the last Supreme Court decision on the matter back in 1957. The Supreme Court has now confirmed that the 1957 ruling still stands and the Court of Appeals was wrong.

> The Federal Circuit denied the transfer by relying on one of its precedents from 1990, which loosened the geographic limits on patent cases. Heartland urged the Supreme Court to overturn that decision, arguing that the high court's own precedent from 1957 held that patent suits are governed by a specific law allowing suits only where defendants are incorporated.

> On Monday, the Supreme Court agreed with Heartland. Writing the opinion for the court, Justice Clarence Thomas said that, contrary to the Federal Circuit's rationale, the U.S. Congress did not change the rules over where patent suits may be filed since the 1957 decision.

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