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Bam! Zechariah declares CAFC to be anti-patent

By Lawrence B. Ebert, Esq.

On 7 Aug 09, the 271Blog had a post which began:

Manasseh Zechariah, economist and assistant professor at Johnson & Wales University College of Business, decided to take groups of decisions from the CAFC, and run variables related to those decisions through different theoretical models to see what came out.

The 271blog highlighted Zechariah's statement: Results show that overall the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit is an anti-patent court.

IPBiz has waited several days, but no one commented on Johnson & Wales University. In fact, to date, there is only one comment on the post:

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The commenter's link takes one to How To Cash In With Your Million Dollar Idea!

If Johnson & Wales University doesn't sound familiar as a center of patent law, that might be reasonable. It isn't (but then one might argue about Stanford University, too, wherein one has papers proclaiming Gary Boone as the inventor of the integrated circuit.)

However, Johnson & Wales might be familiar to some, specifically as to the university?s most recognizable alum ? Chef Emeril Lagasse, class of 1978.

Reluctantgourmet writes: J&W offers an Associate?s Degree in Culinary Arts which focuses on not only fundamentals and classical techniques, but also critical thinking skills and creativity.

***Did Zechariah kick the patent debate up a notch? With Quillen and Webster's ramblings as a baseline, he couldn't miss. Critical thinking has been notably missing among the likes of Quillen/Webster and Jaffe/Lerner.

Whether he is right as to "anti-patent" is a different story.

Abstract of Zechariah's paper, click here

IPBiz asks:

Will one read about the work in law review articles by "pro-reform" professors? If the paper by Cecil D. Quillen, Jr. and Ogden H. Webster, Continuing Patent Applications and Performance of the U.S. Patent and Trademark O?ce?One More Time, The Federal Circuit Bar Journal, 379 (2009) is a guide, the answer is probably not. Quillen and Webster dodge criticisms of their work by the simple expedient of not citing them. And editors/referees of law review articles don't evaluate the articles for citation of relevant prior work, a sublime irony when one writes of patent law. To oneself ignore prior art when complaining about how the patent office ignores pertinent prior art is comical, if not ludicrous.

Full post as published by IPBiz on August 12, 2009 (boomark / email).