Co-opted? It's been run by patent lawyers pretty much from the start. See http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/09/how-a-rogue-appea... for a history of the place.

In this case, the decision is by chief judge radar, who believes the court's goal should be to strengthen intellectual property protections.

How do i know this?

He told me (and the rest of the class) this, when I took his class on the federal circuit in law school many years ago.

Silly me, of course, always thought courts were there to decide law, not have policy goals.

In any case, this is one of a long line of the federal circuit giving the middle finger to the supreme court. Judge radar and others basically believe the supreme court is not helpful to them when they are trying to create rules practitioners can follow, so he tries to ignore them when possible.

He also cites his completely ridiculous reasoning from CLS Bank:

  At bottom, with a claim tied to a computer in a specific 
  way, such that the computer plays a meaningful role in the 
  performance of the claimed invention, it is as a matter of
  fact not likely to pre-empt virtually all uses of an   
  underlying abstract idea, leaving the invention patent  
  eligible

For example, I imagine lots of people on this website would be happy if a judge took an expansive view of the 4th amendment and asserted that was important for courts to strengthen 4th amendment protections. And that would be totally okay.

However, In the real world, where manufacturing evidence against people gets you nothing, or repeatedly encouraging clients to lie under oath, and helping them, gets you suspended for 9 months (http://overlawyered.com/2013/05/n-y-p-i-lawyers-are-suspende...), no, it would not make any difference.

(I agree, btw, that maryland would have disbarred those guys. I'm licensed there, and it's one of the few states that takes ethical obligations seriously)

(My point of view is that we would be better off without software patents. It would be hard to find a US patent lawyer or court who would agree.)

Also a random note in case anyone gets confused. There is only one such court, but cases are often heard by a subset of the justices. So what result you get can depend on which justices hear the case. Mark Lemley's claim is that there is a sharp divide between the justices.

To be specific, like all U.S. Courts of Appeal, the Federal Circuit hears cases in panels of three judges, drawn from the overall pool. In certain circumstances (notably, anything that requires a prior panel opinion to be overruled), a majority of the judges on the court may vote to rehear a matter en banc, in which case all the judges on the court vote on the outcome.

If I recall correctly, the panels are assigned randomly as the cases come in, so if there is a marked division in opinions within the court, the outcome can depend heavily on the luck of the draw.

Justice Stevens wrangled four votes on the Supreme Court for that proposition as recently as 2010. If we could replace some of the pro-software patent majority (Roberts, Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas, Alito) in the Bilsky decision, maybe Breyer could wrangle five votes someday.

Of course, the CAFC might just overrule the Supreme Court if that ever happens.

(You say the CAFC can't overrule the Supreme Court? Wrong-o! [0] Don't read the link unless you're in a profanity-safe environment; not because it contains profanity, but because you're likely to shout some.)

[0] http://www.ipwatchdog.com/2012/03/20/supreme-court-mayo-v-pr...

As for courts, given currently binding precedent for software patents, barring changes in legislation, no court other than the Supreme Court should decide that software patents should not be allowed. Given that the Supreme Court failed to come to that conclusion, it is hard to find a court that would say that. :-(

The judges are appointed not just from the patent bar but all the areas of jurisdictional experience.

Today there are six patent lawyers and four others on the CAFC with one of each awaiting confirmation. There is a rumor that Obama's patent lawyer appointment is actually better than average, but we won't know for a while; the Senate isn't approving new judges much anymore and vacancies continue to accumulate throughout the system.

The CLS bank v. Alice decision this spring came down 5-5. The Alice patent was one of those egregiously bad, transparently fraudulent, and obviously invalid ones we hear about so often. It claimed a monopoly over most any kind of traditional escrow process organized by a third party over a computer network. The CAFC found it valid initially and then threw it out -- barely and over the technicalities of a tie vote.

The final decision was five patent lawyers in favor of validity and four non-patent lawyers joined by one patent lawyer finding invalidity. The dissenting opinions were particularly virulent and nasty in defending the patentability of everything you can imagine and wanting every bad and destructive monopoly to be found valid and granted repeatedly forever.

It's a funny thing; I once thought the way to clean up medical malpractice litigation would be a board of expert judges or advisors who knew when the science was real or just made up for the case. In fact, now I see that system would be even worse. There might be fewer decision made by juries on the basis of gross scientific illiteracy, but the new judges would become throughly corrupt and abuse the system mercilessly. In fact, every kind of special purpose court is probably worse than the cost of ignorance and random wrong decisions that generalist courts make.

My inclination is to assume that they are likely to be as bad on other areas as they specifically are for patents. However I don't pay attention to that, so I really don't know.

I was not speaking about establishing binding precedent. However, even on that note, your argument rings hollow--the FISC has established precedent that has very much become the prevailing understanding of "legal" where its cases are concerned. That's why we've arrived at the mess we're in. Whether the precedent is binding or not is debatable, as nobody I've yet heard of is quoting FISC decisions in other law enforcement actions/cases. But when we have every official from the President onward declaring that everything is "legal" because it has been reviewed and decided upon repeatedly over the last few decades by "the courts", I think trying to make a technical argument on the binding nature of the precedents established is misguided.

FISC precedent is important in the sense that it guides FISC itself, and it guides grants of foreign intelligence warrants, but at the end of the day, if the government wants to use information collected pursuant to a FISC warrant to prosecute you, it has to do so in a regular U.S. District Court, and that court is not bound in any way by the FISC's interpretations of the law. In contrast, in a patent litigation, all the U.S. District Courts are absolutely bound by the Federal Circuit's precedent.

You've said nothing materially different from me on the point that I made. You are pinpointing and continuing to dispute an off-hand comment about rubber-stamping with drawing upon the establishment of precedent and its binding nature on other courts, and again, I wasn't saying anything about that issue at all.

If I was to hazard a guess, I'd say you misunderstood the intent of my jab and are carrying forward an inconsistent comparison, cherry picking one minor detail to dispute the jab, and creating a bit of a straw man here that is completely pointless.

Here, I will say it again:

I was referring only to the fact that given their caseload and decisions, the CAFC often appears as a rubber stamp court for patent litigation. I was not speaking about establishing binding precedent [on any other courts].

Sheesh, friend. You're barking up the wrong tree here.

Second, and this is more pointing out an implication of your point rather than a disagreement, FISC being a rubber stamp is much less of a problem than Fed. Cir. being a rubber stamp. FISC being a rubber stamp only affects warrant requests that come in front of FISC itself. Fed. Cir. being a rubber stamp has ripple effects throughout the entire court system because it creates precedent binding on every district court and appellate court in the country.

I've tried to be very polite, but we're getting nowhere because we're talking past each other (most charitable reading I have).

My original statement, to which you replied with particulars about binding precedence, said absolutely zero about establishing precedents that bind other courts. Who cares if one court's rubber stamp affects a wider court radius than the others if they are both operating as rubber stamps for a particular kind of case and that is all that was being said?

If you want to have an exchange and dispute whether or not the CAFC operates as a patent litigator's rubber stamp in much the same way that the FISC operates as a spy agency's rubber stamp, then please do so. If not, then by the universe, stop changing the subject to something that is not of primary concern when evaluating whether or not the CAFC is a rubber-stamp patent troll's court. We have nothing to discuss on the precedent issue because I sincerely do not disagree or care to dispute the ways in which the FISC "shaped law in its area", as it is not at all related to the current thread.

[edit: removed strongly-worded-out-of-exasperation language. my apologies.]

The core issue is this. You are probably not a lawyer. Thus "rubber stamp for a vested interest" is enough to qualify two courts as being very much like each other.

By contrast rayiner IS a lawyer. (And one who is well-known on this site.) To a lawyer the key characteristics of a court are what it has jurisdiction over, and who its precedence binds. Because that is what matters in litigation. On these measures, the two courts are about as unlike as it is possible to be. FISC binds itself only. By contrast CAFC binds every court in the country that can hear a patent case except the Supreme Court.

I believe that this whole argument could have been avoided if you had realized that he was fundamentally right about the precedence issue (which he is), and limited yourself to the similarity of both being rubber stamps.

The core issue is not that I am not a lawyer (although I am not; academics were political theory; ditched law/grad school route for programming). It is, rather, that I used "operates very much like" in a way that would spur a lawyer to step in and want to quibble over words, without pausing to reflect on the context in which the "operates very much like" was made. The primary fault is mine for being vague and leaving such a wide-ranging statement open to too much misinterpretation.

That rayiner made his first statement was understandable, and is why I offered the followup explanation. That we continued to further spiral around issues of precedence, which I understand, and with which I was not disagreeing, left me wondering what was going on. Had I suggested that FISC decisions bind other courts, I could completely understand. But I did not. Because it was rayiner commenting, who I know well from his otherwise very sensible comments here, left me wondering if he was trolling me for fun or something.

Anyway, this has hit the level of absurd for me. I'll back out because I respect and upvote all three of your guys' statements on the regular (you, rayiner, & tptacek), and I had zero expectation and no remaining interest in arguing over a stupid jab I shouldn't have made in a thread about a court decision.

Thanks for feedback.

I am not assaulting people writing comments. Of course, perhaps in your opinion using strong language equates with assaulting the eyes of the readers. I don't hold that view, but I'm happy to apologize if you've been offended.

I have not invented motives for rayiner's authorship. I have repeatedly asked what rayiner's motivation is because I am trying to understand why we're talking past each other when we don't have material disagreement on the precedent issue (while repeatedly calling attention to the fact that is not what I was referring to).

Just the other day, I read through a very lengthy exchange between you and other commenters doing the same thing--you asked a question that deserved answering, and everyone else changed the subject, diverted attention, attempted to get into your personal opinions and how that had fuck-all to do with your original question. You went what seemed like a dozen rounds continually asking people talking about different things why that had anything at all to do with what you were asking, and reiterating your question. I don't have the interest in going a dozen rounds with the same person to keep saying, "That is not what I was talking about. We do not disagree."

I made a jab at the CAFC, and have now wasted several comment rounds on trying to repeatedly explain to the same person exactly what I meant, that rayiner and I are not in material disagreement on the issue of precedents (though perhaps on our interpretation of precedent existing in FISC decisions, irrespective of their reach to other courts), that the issue of precedents is not at all related to the act of being a rubber-stamp, and apparently we can't get away from continually making pointless comments about precedents.

As for calling the author a troll? No, sorry. You're incorrect there. I asked if the author was here for trolling. It was an honest question, not an accusation. By the time we'd gone into the third round of saying the same things, I was seriously wondering if I was just being trolled for pedantic quibbles over how a particular word or set of words was interpreted.

Your original statement also said absolutely zero about rubber stamping. Your second statement had two paragraphs: one about rubber stamping, one about binding precedent. It's not "changing the subject" if I fail to read your mind about what the subject happens to be.

If you fail to read my comment, in which I explicitly state, "Here is what I meant and my intention", and then continue to argue something on which we are not in disagreement? Absolutely.

I made it ridiculously clear what my statement meant.

Since the Supreme Court has created large good faith effort holes in the exclusionary rule for law enforcement, any source of reliable warrants creates an unlimited opportunity for mischief. Other courts will have to admit evidence first suspected because of information obtained through any apparently valid FISA warrant.

And since FISC is a no-work sinecure for ultra-right judges to draw a salary and benefits for occasionally showing up to rubber stamp secret warrants, it blows a hole in any restrictions on search and seizure for anyone in any court with access to FISC.