Supreme Court Unanimously Smacks Down CAFC Two More Times
from the because-cafc-is-a-joke dept
What do you know? The Supreme Court has completely shot down two more decisions from the "patent appeals court," which is supposed to be an expert in patent law. The court of appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC), which was set up explicitly to cover "complicated" patent cases, has been getting shot down by the Supreme Court left and right over the past few years, often unanimously. It happened a month ago on fee shifting and it happened twice more today on key patent cases: Limelight v. Akamai and Nautilus v. Biosig.In the Limelight case, CAFC had made the somewhat ridiculous ruling that companies can be guilty of inducing infringement even if there is no direct infringement. Basically, everyone agreed that at no point did Limelight actually infringe on Akamai's patents, because part of the steps are actually completed by Limelight's users, rather than Limelight itself. The CAFC felt that was good enough, and even though at no point does Limelight do everything in Akamai's patent, it still infringed. The Surpeme Court, thankfully, found this ruling to be nonsensical. And, once again, the Supreme Court smacks around the CAFC in its ruling:
Neither the Federal Circuit... nor respondents... dispute the proposition that liability for inducement must be predicated on direct infringement. This is for good reason, as our case law leaves no doubt that inducement liability may arise “if, but only if, [there is] . . . direct infringement.”...Yes, the Supreme Court is saying that the CAFC -- which is supposed to be the expert in understanding patents and patent law -- fundamentally misunderstands what it means to infringe on a patent. Ouch.
One might think that this simple truth is enough to dispose of this appeal. But the Federal Circuit reasoned that a defendant can be liable for inducing infringement under §271(b) even if no one has committed direct infringement within the terms of §271(a) (or any other provision of the patent laws), because direct infringement can exist independently of a violation of these statutory provisions...
The Federal Circuit's analysis fundamentally misunderstands what it means to infringe a method patent.
The ruling by Justice Alito goes on to point out that the CAFC seems to be trying to set up an entirely new concept of inducing infringement where there is no direct infringement -- and that's clearly not what the law allows. As the ruling notes, if Congress wanted that to be the law, it could write that into the law. But it has not. The Supreme Court further notes (importantly) that "inducement" is different than the criminal standards of "aiding and abetting" (this is an issue we've discussed repeatedly in copyright law -- so everyone insisting that inducing and aiding & abetting are equivalent may want to read carefully what SCOTUS has to say here).
The Nautilus case involved "ambiguous" patent claims -- a major problem in the patent world today. Once again, CAFC took a rather patent maximalist view of things, allowing many ambiguous claims, but the Supreme Court unanimously rejects that as ridiculous:
We conclude that the Federal Circuit’s formulation, which tolerates some ambiguous claims but not others, does not satisfy the statute’s definiteness requirement.The CAFC standard was that you could reject the claim only if it was "insolubly ambiguous" -- in other words, only if a court couldn't work through multiple interpretations to pick a reasonable one. But, as noted above, the Supreme Court says that goes against the very basic idea of patent law. As the ruling (by Justice Ginsburg) notes:
It cannot be sufficient that a court can ascribe some meaning to a patent’s claims; the definiteness inquiry trains on the understanding of a skilled artisan at the time of the patent application, not that of a court viewing matters post hoc. To tolerate imprecision just short of that rendering a claim “insolubly ambiguous” would diminish the definiteness requirement’s public-notice function and foster the innovation-discouraging “zone of uncertainty,” ... against which this Court has warned.Rather than choose a different standard, however, the Supreme Court punts the case back to CAFC to see if it can try again, this time with a better standard that maybe, just maybe, the Supreme Court will accept next time around.
Between these recent decisions and the current ethics scandal at CAFC, at what point will we finally consider just putting the court out of its misery. It has never served any purpose other than to massively expand patent law way outside of what the law is supposed to do. It's great that the Supreme Court has finally been putting it back in line, but it seems like there must be a more effective way of doing this than having CAFC hand down so many bad decisions.
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Filed Under: ambiguous claims, cafc, claims, direct infringement, indirect infringement, inducement, insolubly ambiguous, patent trolls, patents, supreme court
Companies: akamai, biosig, limelight, nautilus
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But this is good...I bet the Supreme Courts gets ever more pissed off at them for overruling "good rulings" from the lower Courts, and sending them their own idiotic rulings. It only means that with each new ruling the Supreme Court will get more aggressive in defining which patents are good and which are not, to limit the "damage" the stupid CAFC Court can do.
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Re:
"The Federal Circuit's analysis fundamentally misunderstands what an API is and why it can't be subject to copyrignt protection under the law."
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Honor
"The Federal Circuit's analysis fundamentally misunderstands what it means to infringe a method patent."
Would cause them to instantly resign in abject humiliation.
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Re: Honor
B = resign
Your statement: if A, then B.
Contrapositive: if ~B, then ~A
Yup, seems about right!
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2. Mike mentions akamai in an article
3. Therefore Mike is an akamai shill
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the real kicker is that these court rulings seem to depend on the mood of the judges at the time. rather than relying on case law or understanding the law properly, from what the appeals court has said, the judges toss a coin!!
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about PDFy ...
From the PDFy website:
I'll assume that PDFy requires use of the latest (and most resource-busting) versions of os/browser/Java/script/Flash combinations, but I'm used to that. My only question is, how do I download the PDF? In PDFy's document image window, the 3rd button from the right is the download button, but when that doesn't work, is there a direct download link somewhere else?
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Re: about PDFy ...
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Re: Re: about PDFy ...
It's somewhat unfortunate that, as with the MP3, no open-source PDF alternative has ever been adopted. As both file formats are about due to have their original patents expire, maybe no open-source "copy" will ever take over.
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Thank you, no. I hope this is dead and buried.
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Re: Re: Re: about PDFy ...
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Re: Re: Re: Re: about PDFy ...
When used properly for the purposes they were intended they are great. Yes, I know people do make crappy PDFs by using built in scanning software that just wraps a single image into a PDF wrapper which is pretty worthless unless you are trying to stack multiple pages into a single file. And sure Acrobat's editing capabilities pretty much suck. But when you are doing desktop publishing, the ability to create a multi-page layout, package it printer/prepress ready, in a format that that is not only printable, but freely viewable cross-platform with embedded images and fonts pretty much rocks.
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Re: about PDFy ...
I just found PDFy last week, and thought it was a nice alternative for all the listed reasons. And when we had trouble with DC decided to try it. But discovered a few other issues with it, so once DC was working went back to that...
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Re: about PDFy ...
This button should always work, even if the PDF doesn't load (for example, if you're using an older browser that doesn't support pdf.js). If you don't see such a button - you can check at http://pdf.yt/d/BR6ektz0ghe0hii9/embed?sparse=0 - please e-mail me at admin@cryto.net with more information about the operating system, browser, etc. that you are using.
PDFy (which uses pdf.js) doesn't require Flash or Java, by the way - just a browser with an up-to-date Javascript implementation :) There's a list of supported browsers at https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js/wiki/Frequently-Asked-Questions#faq-support
I'm still working on a 'fallback' mechanism using images, for older browsers that don't support pdf.js. Shouldn't be too long until that's working.
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"Misunderstood" My Behind
I think the Supreme Court was being extremely generous. I don't think CAFC misunderstood a thing. I think they were deliberately trying to misconstrue and the twist the law for the benefit of some select special interest groups.
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A Man Without A Country
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Count the week lost...
Guess this week wasn't a total loss for CAFC.
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examiner6k@yahoo.com
You need to read the decision again. The USSC implemented a standard of its own: "reasonable certainty".
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