Posts Tagged: "Donald W. Banner"

An Abdication of Collective Responsibility by the Federal Circuit

The Federal Circuit has often demanded some technical advantage under § 101 when none is required by U.S. patent law. The Federal Circuit has also made § 101 more burdensome, unpredictable and subjective than an obviousness determination under § 103, and § 101 is supposed to be a threshold test that acts to weed out only the most egregious attempts to patent fundamental principles. § 101 was never meant to weed out whole new areas of technology, particularly not nascent technologies. But that is exactly what is happening and the Court that has been charged to make sense of it all, the Federal Circuit, seems to be abdicating its collective responsibility by refusing to settle on a repeatable test that results in predictable outcomes.