Chicago Patent Attorneys File Supreme Court Amicus Brief in American Axle

Chicago patent attorneys Kevin E. Noonan, Michael S. Borella, Aaron V. Gin, and Adnan M. "Eddie" Obissi have filed an amicus brief supporting Supreme Court review of the Federal Circuit's decision to invalidate claims of American Axle's U.S. Patent No. 7,774,911 under 35 U.S.C § 101.  The Attorneys (who are all Patent Docs authors or contributors) argue that the Federal Circuit's 6-6 split on whether to rehear the case en banc is compelling evidence that the court is severely divided in how it applies the patent-eligibility analysis of Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank Int'l.

In finding American Axle's method of manufacturing vibration-damping driveline shafts to be directed to no more than an unclaimed law of physics, the Federal Circuit has misapplied the Supreme Court's Alice test, and in doing so, has called into question the eligibility of any invention, the Attorneys write.  They walk through examples of how the Federal Circuit's application of the test would have rendered iconic historical inventions such as the telephone and light bulb invalid under § 101, whereas proper application of the test would have had the opposite outcome.

The Attorneys urge the Supreme Court to take up this case because the lower courts and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office desperately need its guidance.  The justices are scheduled to confer on February 19, and the certiorari decision should follow shortly after that.

The brief can be found on the Supreme Court's American Axle docket.

Comments

[Paul Cole]

A very challenging brief with a distinct new viewpoint. It is about time that SCOTUS took up this subject again, and hopefully the persuasive power of this brief and others will just tip the balance.

[skeptical]

You have cast a stone into an ocean of intentional indifference.

[MaxDrei]

On the subject of "tipping the balance", I can see two other factors that might help.

Axle is a mechanical engineering case, so is more accessible to non-specialists (including the Justices of the Supreme Court) and not as alarmingly esoteric as a data processing or DNA case. The Justices need not be frightened of getting sucked in to it.

Being a pure mech eng case, it is a good illustration of the unfortunate "creep" that is happening, of denials of eligibility into fields that are manifestly not abstract ideas. I mean, just try driving a heavy vehicle that has a prop shaft that suffers from severe vibration. See what non-abstract messages you are getting through your seat.

As Dr Johnson would have said: I refute it thus. Argumentum ad Lapidem?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_the_stone

[skeptical]

Thanks for the wiki article. It is always interesting to read more on the subject of various logical fallacies, but I would add that to assume that all inductive reasoning must lead to a false conclusion is itself a fallacy.

Quite in fact, there is a fallacy involved in the assumption of the refuting by kicking the stone itself, as it is posited that the kicking the stone was ONLY inductive reasoning, and the situation was not so — the kicking was part of a larger conversation, and had context in which the plain fact of the ‘rebound’ was just not merely an asserted conclusion being repeated, but instead was a physical argument in support of the asserted conclusion.

Wiki’s are nice sources, but one must still apply critical thinking as they themselves may often be incomplete.