Imagine that you’re a professor with a widely read blog. A case comes down and you are presented with a range of choices as to how to discuss the case, and how to title the post that discusses the case. What’s an ethical professor to do? Why, let’s give the post the most misleading title imaginable! Yay for false assertions! Yay for confusion!

Heckuva job. Witness the “benefits” conferred by tenure, folks. No consequences for Dennis Crouch. Heck, it’s just the patent system … which limits the freedom of everybody in the country. Bygones!

Okay, let’s move beyond Dennis’ recurring title failures and try to straighten a couple things out.

First, for the sake of accuracy:

1) The properly claimed inventions of mechanical engineers are no less eligible for patenting than they were before this case

2) The fact that an invention was the work of a “mechanical engineer” has never conferred automatically eligibility to a claim that covers that invention

Everybody got that? Great. You’re welcome, Dennis. I hope you enjoyed the hysterics from your peanut gallery of eternally suffering and oh-so-misunderstood patent attorneys (always doing the work of the angels). I know I did! LOL Great job of tr 0 lling them, assuming that was your intent (which I know it wasn’t).

Now let’s just recognize the (main) issue here: assuming the facts as understood by the majority (and folks should feel free to contest that understanding if they have special knowledge of the facts) the issue is functional claiming at the point of novelty and whether that defect represents a failure under 101.

The silliest “argument” against the ineligibility of claims that protect “functionalities” and “results” is the one made below by Buckets and Greg DeL. It’s one of those zombie arguments that refuses to go away because, on its fact, it’s so easy to “follow”. The “argument” is that “claims which protect functionalities shouldn’t be ineligible under 101 because that’s what 112 is for.” Why is this such a silly argument? Because both 101 and 112 serve the same purpose (shared by 102 and 103): claims that violate the public interest by protecting subject matter which does not promote progress but which merely siphon wealth into the hands of attorneys and opportunistic game-players should not be granted. Put another way: there is nothing “wrong” about a claim failing under multiple prongs of the patent statute simultaneously. We should, in fact, expect this to happen given what we know about human nature and human fallibility. It’s a feature, not a bug, of the system that the statutes overlap each other to a degree (the extent of overlap may change depending on the claim from which the statutes are being tested).

Let’s take a sample claim to illustrate the silliness of Greg’s argument (and yes it’s fun to pick on Greg because he refuses to discuss patent law with people who don’t pat him nicely on the head simply because he engages in that cloying erudition that shallow thinkers equate with civility when it frequently indicates the opposite):

1. A new useful man-made non-obvious mechanically engineered device.

Does this claim fail 112? You bet it does. Does it fail 101 as well? Of course it does.

It fails both statutes for reasons that are essentially indistinguishable (and it also fails both statutes for reasons that are possibly distinguishable). Is one statute “better” than the other? Only if you care about the precise words that are used, or you like the name of some particular case more than the name of some other particular case. Otherwise … who cares? Here’s who cares: that guy out there (almost invariably a guy with quite a lot of money, relatively speaking) who is “concerned” that the choice of statute will “destroy pioneering inventions and the ability to claim them broadly”. That guy will complain about whatever statute is in fact used. And then guess what happens if you take those complaints seriously? Well, as soon as the other statute is used to achieve the exact same result for pretty much the exact same reasons then that guy will complain just as loudly (or more loudly) about that statute. This is not mere speculation, by the way. This is the way that the patent maximalist types (not necessarily Greg, who is quite young relatively speaking, and can blame his present confusion on youthful naivety) have operated in broad daylight for many years now.

So let’s put the zombie “wrong statute” “arguments” to rest, mkay? LOL I know it will never happen. Such is the nature of the zombie “argument”. [Kudos to Ben for at least recognizing that 112 jurisprudence is probably more ‘confused’ and worthless at this point than 101].

Some other nonsense from down below that shows how far off the reservation the biggest crybabies can wander:

Any claim can be “directed to” an abstract concept, and then the judge can just say there is nothing more.

In fact, a judge can’t accurately (or legally) “say that” when, in fact, the claim recites non-obvious objective physical structure. And there is no case that suggest otherwise. None. Nada. What this commenter is doing is engaging in chicken little screeching, straight outa Big Jeans echo chamber. Might as well just ask for a million dollars from the government, straight up, because “I deserve it and life is unfair because I say so, so there nyah nyah.” Very compelling!

And then there’s good ol’ Greggie DeLaughatus again, talking about “overturning Mayo.” What does that even mean, Greg? You can’t “overturn Mayo” because Mayo stands for a very simple proposition: lawyers can’t use words to do things which insult basic Constitutional principles. So please, Little Greggie, pull your f—-ing head out of your f——ing @$$ already. Thanks.