Posts Tagged: "American Axle and Manufacturing Inc. v. Neapco Drivelines LLC"

On Friday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) issued Orders granting a request for panel rehearing and denying a request for rehearing en banc in response to a joint petition filed by American Axle & Manufacturing (AAM). The CAFC also issued a precedential modified opinion of its October 3, 2019 opinion in American Axle & Manufacturing v. Neapco Holdings. In the Order Denying Rehearing En Banc, Judges Newman, Moore, O’Malley, Reyna, Lourie and Stoll dissented from the denial of rehearing en banc. Each of Dyk, Chen, Newman, Stoll and O’Malley wrote separately.

Since the Supreme Court’s Alice decision in 2014, many patent prosecutors in Industrial & Mechanical Technologies practice groups have been spared the headaches that the decision created for their colleagues in Electrical & Computer Technologies practice groups. So, it came as quite a surprise, perhaps unwelcome to some, when the Federal Circuit decided American Axle v. Neapco, invalidating claims for a method for manufacturing propshafts as being directed to ineligible subject matter under Section 101 of the U.S. Patent Act…. Almost six months later, it appears that Neapco was right, at least when it comes to patent prosecution in the mechanical arts. Indeed, both anecdotal evidence and prosecution data aggregated by Juristat demonstrate that the American Axle decision has not affected the prosecution of mechanical inventions before the USPTO in any significant way.

Everybody in the patent world is talking about the latest atrocity from the Federal Circuit known as the American Axle decision, but few actually appreciate the true level of absurdity. Yes, 35 U.S.C. § 101 swallowed §§ 112(a), 112(f), 102, and 103 in a single decision (a new feat of judicial acrobatics), and Judges Taranto and Dyk displayed their technical ignorance. For example, in citing the Flook decision Judges Dyk and Taranto assert that Flook’s mathematical formula (known to a million-plus engineers as the steepest-descent algorithm) is a “natural law.” American Axle, slip op. at p. 19. Seriously? Are Federal Circuit judges so technically ignorant that the entirety of the country is doomed to believe such an idiotic fantasy that a particular adaptive mathematical algorithm associated with no natural law must be a natural law?