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Authored by: PolR on Friday, June 21 2013 @ 01:57 PM EDT |
Quinn understands the Supreme Court is the highest court in the land.
I think Quinn's statement about the Federal Circuit overriding the Supreme
should not be taken in the sense you have understood. He was refering to the
practical consequences of how the Supreme Court oversees the Federal Circuit.
The Supreme Court has an history of not taking patentable subject matter cases
for decades. For instance Diehr was issued in 1981. The next case on the same
topic was Bilski in 2010. This is a period of almost 30 years where the Supreme
Court just let the Federal Circuit run loose with software patents without
overseeing them. During this period they issued Alappat, AT&T v. Excel and
State Street. The practical effect of these cases was to make an end-run around
the Supreme Court precedents of Benson and Flook while paying lip service to
what the Supremes said. They are the source of the explosion in the number of
software and business methods patents.
So I think Quinn was expecting this pattern to repeat. He was assuming that at
some point in the future the Supreme Court will go asleep again and the Federal
Circuit will issue more precedents making end-runs around the Supreme court
decisions.
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