Find Me Nine Less-Qualified People

I'm not sure this is a competition I want to get into, but I'm pretty sure I can take up Gene Quinn's challenge, as posted on ipwatchdog, to find nine people less qualified than SCOTUS to rule on patent matters.

To be fair, Quinn isn't proposing an actual competition. Instead, he's joining the chorus of people who've grown frustrated with the Supreme Court's confused, self-contradictory, and scientifically nonsensical rulings. This Court has issued several significant patent rulings in the past half-decade that threaten to upend completely our understanding of what is and what is not patentable. Quinn argues (well, rants really - it's a good rant) that the sum total of these rulings is akin to a prior Court's infamous definition of pornography - something that the Justices could know by seeing it, but couldn't write down a good definition for.

So what are inventors supposed to do? Guess? As Quinn says: "It defies logic to hold people accountable based on a standard that even those who judge cannot, or will not, define.". To make matters worse, the CAFC and SCOTUS are in the middle of a protracted struggle over the meanings and interpretations of the laws on patent eligibility.

The root of the problem, I think, is one that Quinn touches on but doesn't delve into for this blog entry: the law itself is bad. A fundamental problem with the Alice decision is that it confuses section 101 and 103/102. There's a good argument to be made that 101 could (should? must?) be dispensed with, as its vagueness and interpretations are at the root of many problems. Along the way Congress really needs to make some kind of clear ruling on what to do about patenting virtual machines (commonly called software).

Also, I'd like a pony.