By banning any and all attempts to understand the relationship of the claim to the prior art when determining eligibility, the statute effectively nullifies itself. It might as well just say “Transparent efforts to draft around the requirements of 101 are encouraged and such can efforts can not be relied upon to determine eligibility.” Crouch knows this, of course, because he’s still got half his wits about him. Unfortunately, he’s apparently allowed himself to become so compromised or conflicted over the years that he is no longer capable of discussing or teaching basic logic in this context.

The really unfortunate part for everybody (except, of course, for that perpetually whining and entitled crowd of already wealthy patent game players) is that nothing good can result when you start from a pile of pure d 0 g s –t. That’s doubly unfortunate when many of us have spent decades describing the various flavors of ineligibility and the policy (or Constitutional) issues around them.

For example, nobody except a tiny fraction of patent attorneys believes that a “computerized” database comprising some “non-obvious” information content should be patentable. Likewise, nobody believes that such a database constitutes a “new computer.” Determining what kinds of “improvements” in the “art” of using logic to instruct computers is eligible is undeniably an incredibly important determination but instead of facing that issue, the drafters of this statute intentionally and shamefully (or completely ig n 0 r@ntly) have chosen to pretend that they can simply turn back the clock 40 years. As I said, it’s a j 0 ke, and in a sane world the people responsible for this would be mocked by every professional patent attorney.

Likewise, nobody believes that you should be able to patent a generic method of using a prior art detection tool to detect some “newly discovered” naturally occurring phenomenon, e.g., using a telescope to detect a “non-obvious” newly discovered asteroid that is heading towards the earth, or using a scale to weigh a “non-obvious” newly discovered Amazonian frog.

But the profession has turned into a ce s s p00l so I guess let’s all just swim to the b0tt0m and pretend we were born yesterday and that nobody will ever be so bold as to try claim that sort of thing. Sure, that will work out just great.