Photo from Reuters

Summary: A long series of abuses in CAFC may as well suggest that this court has become broken beyond repair

THE Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC), a corrupt court which brought software patents to the world some decades ago, is seriously considered rogue and some are calling for it to shut down.

Mike Masnick names another reason to shut down CAFC: "Back in 2004, when I first read the book Innovation and Its Discontents, I was convinced that the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, better known as CAFC, or the "patent appeals court" was a huge part of the problem with the patent system. It was the special court that had been set up in the early 80s to handle all patent appeals, based on the totally misplaced notion that because patent issues were so technical, regular appeals courts wouldn't be able to handle the nuances. What we got instead was a court that became "patent specialists" in that they spent much of their time with the patent bar -- who tended to be lawyers who profited handsomely from an ever expanding patent law. It didn't help that one of the original CAFC judges was Giles Rich, a former patent attorney who almost single-handedly wrote the Patent Act of 1951. Rich more or less made it his lifetime goal to expand the patent system to cover "everything under the sun made by man," and he came close to succeeding."

The article is titled "CAFC: The Rogue Patent Court, Captured By The Patent Bar, Needs To Go Away" and it very much reflects on what we see much of the time.

The numbers of controversies or corruption (as we have covered before) surrounding CAFC indicate that it should not be unthinkable or controversial to suggest shutdown. When is a court deemed "above the law"? ⬆