Skip to main content

Patents and Driveshafts


A driveshaft is the roughly cylindrical doohicky of an automobile that transfers mechanical energy from the engine or transmission to the wheels. Unsurprisingly, every driveshaft obeys the laws of physics. More specifically, every driveshaft obeys what is called Hooke's law, which describes the dampening of vibrations. 

Now some controversial litigation involving a driveshaft is before the US Supreme Court and it may help clarify, or further muddy, the question of what the high court has meant, in other recent cases, when it has said that a natural law is not eligible for patent. At one level, it seems obvious enough. Nobody can patent Newton's law of gravity and sue the owners of orchards if their apples fall to the ground without a proper licensing deal. But nobody has actually tried to patent Gravity. And it is not obvious whether anyone is now really trying to patent Hooke's law. 

The case is AMERICAN AXLE v. NEAPCO HOLDING. American sued Neapco in the US district of Delaware, alleging that Neapco had infringed its patent. The trial court held that the claims were ineligible for patent protection. 

That view was upheld by a panel of the appellate court. 

Here's a dramatic twist: Napco appealed from the panel to the Federal Circuit appellate court, and the full court -- tied. Opinion split right down the middle: 6 to 6. As they say in baseball, "the tie goes to the runner." If the ball and the runner arrive at the plate simultaneously, the runner is safe. Likewise, a tie upholds the view of the court (or in this case the panel) below. 

The dramatic tie indicates the level of uncertainty about this "law of nature" stuff. So it is now up to SCOTUS. 

The relevant test here is known as the Mayo/Alice test. That term is drawn from the two key precedents, 
Mayo Collaborative v. Prometheus Laboratories (2012) and Alice Corp v. CLS Bank (2014). I have discussed them both in this blog before: Beginning a Discussion of the Supreme Court Term (jamesian58.blogspot.com). 

The two-part Mayo/Alice test is this: A reviewing court must first decide whether the claims are directed to a patent-ineligible concept; and even if it is, the court, second, must determine whether the claim’s elements, which may be considered individually and in combo, transform the nature of those claims into a patent-eligible application. 

That may not sound to you like a monument to judicial clarity. And that might be the problem. 
 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...
24 comments
Read more

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...
10 comments
Read more

The Growing Block Theory of Time

My own disposition, in regard to the philosophy of time, is toward the "growing block" theory. This is the view that past events remain realities, that present-moment events are also realities, but that future events are not yet real. The image is of the universe as a block with an edge on (say) the right-hand side. The block is expanding because that edge is moving ever further right, and that edge is what we call the present, or, simply, "now." Everything to the left of that edge is both static (the past is complete) and, still and forever, real. Think of the phrase "the moving finger writes." The chief alternatives to the growing-block theory are "presentism" (only the now-edge itself is real) and "eternalism" (past, present, and future are all real." I believe that time is a growing block because (1) that's what it feels like, (2) we should stick with the introspective phenomenon unless we have good reason to abandon ...
8 comments
Read more