What are you talking about? There is no "Patent Appeals Court" in the United States. There is the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. And the standard for non-obviousness was most recently articulated by the Supreme Court in KSR v. Teleflex , a 2007 case in which the Court held that the precise prior art combination did not need to be explicitly "written down in that form":

As our precedents make clear, however, the analysis need not seek out precise teachings directed to the specific subject matter of the challenged claim, for a court can take account of the inferences and creative steps that a person of ordinary skill in the art would employ.

The Court further loosened concerns over hindsight bias:

A factfinder should be aware, of course, of the distortion caused by hindsight bias and must be cautious of arguments reliant upon ex post reasoning. ... Rigid preventative rules that deny factfinders recourse to common sense, however, are neither necessary under our case law nor consistent with it.

As for the "more than the sum of its parts" standard: that comes from the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co. case of 1950. And it wasn't modified by some "Patent Appeals Court." It was statutorily overruled by Congress by the Patent Act of 1952, as later interpreted by the Supreme Court itself in Graham v. John Deere .

A patent is not a substitute for a viable business model. One cannot simply receive a patent and wait for the money to roll in, especially not as technology changes around you, quite often in order to work around your patent.

In this case, in 1991 Baylis invented a generator that was based on storing energy in a spring, then using a system of gears to release that energy steadily to power various devices such as a radio. But by 1995 wind-up radios were on their way out and by 2000 they had been entirely replaced by battery-based radios. His invention was a flash in the pan.

So Baylis had a nice idea, made some decent money off of it, but failed to turn that into a sustainable career. Now he wants the entire UK patent system modified in order to rescue him from his misfortune.

Design patents and copyright also cover different subject matter, though that's a finer distinction than utility patents and copyright.

No, definitely copyright. Consider all the special rules for phonorecords, broadcast programming by cable, satellite transmissions of local programming, satellite transmissions of non-local programming, pictorial graphic and sculptural works, nondramatic musical works, computer programs, coin-operated phonorecord players, etc, etc.

This is...not even wrong. Consider a vinyl LP. If the music on the LP is played, that is a performance. But the LP is still a tangible medium of expression in which the work has been fixed. Similarly, running a computer program may be considered a performance, but the hard drive (or whatever medium) is still a tangible medium of expression in which the work (the object code) has been fixed.

Suppose someone wrote a program directly in machine code, as was done in the old days and is still done in some cases now. Would that not be a creative expression? What is different about machine code written by a human as compared to machine code created by a program from source code written by a human?

Anyway, you're making an argument about what the law ought to be. I am describing the law as it is. "At the other end of the abstractions spectrum, source and object code, which are the literal elements of a program, will almost always be found to be protectable expression unless the doctrines of merger and scenes a faire come into play." Gates Rubber Co. v. Bando Chemical Indus., Ltd., 9 F.3d 823, 836 (10th Cir. 1994) (emphasis added).

No, it is a literal expression of the creative decisions made at a higher level.

By analogy, consider an oil painting and a JPEG representation of that oil painting. The oil painting is a creative work of authorship fixed in a tangible medium of expression. In a sense, the JPEG is a functional thing: it describes how to produce an image that represents the oil painting. Much of the nuance of the original is lost: it is two-dimensional, digital, etc. But the JPEG is also a derivative work that expresses many of the creative decisions made in the original work. And so the JPEG is also a creative work.

The same is true of source code and object code. A contrived example may show the principle more clearly. Consider a program that creates poetry based on aesthetic rules created by the programmer. The source code is certainly a creative expression, but so is the object code. It contains and expresses those same creative aesthetic rules, albeit in a very literal way, without the nuance of, e.g., variable names or comments. There has been a certain amount of reduction of expression as a result of the compilation process, but many elements of creative expression are still present.

What the EFF is specifically decrying is functional claiming. That is, an element of a claim described not in terms of what it is but in terms of its function. For example, instead of claiming a nail or a screw, claiming "a means for mechanically fastening" or, even more broadly, "a fastening means." This is allowed under 35 U.S.C. 112 6, now 112(f):

An element in a claim for a combination may be expressed as a means or step for performing a specified function without the recital of structure, material, or acts in support thereof, and such claim shall be construed to cover the corresponding structure, material, or acts described in the specification and equivalents thereof.

In other words, you can use functional claiming, but you have to explain what you mean in the specification, and you only get what you describe there, plus equivalents. If you don't describe what you mean then the claim is invalid as indefinite.

In the case of software, generically claiming an algorithm (e.g. "sorting means") requires describing in the specification what you mean by that. There has to be some corresponding structure. Failure to properly support a functional claim has bitten many a patentee. This happened just recently in a software patent case involving Google as a defendant, for example. Function Media, L.L.C. v. Google Inc.. Overall, the popularity of functional claiming has been dropping like a rock. From ~1992 to 2011 the percentage of newly issued patents with at least one "means for" claim fell from ~45% to ~10%. It has since fallen to almost 5%.

The United States uses a system called "peripheral claiming," in which patent applicants stake out the outermost boundaries or periphery of their claimed invention. This is in contrast to the older (think the 1800s) system of central claiming, where the applicant would claim the "heart" or "gist" of the invention. The problem with central claiming is that courts had to decide when an alleged infringer got "too close" to the claim, which was often a very subjective process. With peripheral claiming, the infringer either has each and every element of the claim or they don't (with a small amount of wiggle room for the doctrine of equivalents). This forces the applicant to say, up front, exactly what they've invented and—importantly—support it in the specification.

Over time, however, there has been a perceived (and perhaps real) growth in the number of patentees trying to make their claims cover more than they actually invented. This is what the written description and enablement requirements in patent law are designed to prevent. See 35 U.S.C. 112. I have said many times on Slashdot and elsewhere that these requirements should be tightened. What the EFF is proposing is, broadly, along those lines, though it is specific to software patents. I am generally not in favor of special rules for different areas of technology. Patent law has mostly avoided that. Copyright law has not, and it has turned the copyright statute into a sprawling mess dictated by special interests.

If the written description and enablement requirements were tightened up, however, then one way that computer-implemented inventions could demonstrate compliance (i.e. show that the application contained "a written description of the invention, and of the manner and process of making and using it, in such full, clear, concise, and exact terms as to enable any person skilled in the art to which it pertains ... to make and use the same") would be to provide extensive source code or pseudocode examples. But in our zeal to rein in unsupported functional claims we should not return to central claiming.

As an aside, right now many if not most patents that involve software use flowcharts rather than pseudocode or source code. This is the result of Patent Office backwardness dating back to its initial opposition to allowing patents on computer-implemented inventions in the first place. Only now is the Patent Office finally recognizing that pseudocode or source code is much more searchable, readable, and useful for everyone involved, including patent examiners, competitors, and alleged infringers.

Your first example isn't very good. The first one, application number 10/437,822 for an IsNot operator in Basic, was abandoned for failure to respond to an office action. Basically the examiner said "this is not patentable" and the applicant gave up.

Because copyright only protects the non-functional creative expression, not the functional aspects of the code. 17 U.S.C. 102. The patent, correspondingly, protects only the functional parts. This is the requirement that an invention be 'useful' as found in 35 U.S.C. 101. The two forms of intellectual property cover entirely non-overlapping subject matter.

And this is not an academic distinction. Consider, for example, a server-based web application. Your code, even your object code, is entirely hidden (barring a security problem). In theory you do not even need copyright; trade secret protection would suffice. But a patent lets you protect the functional aspects of the application.

Or consider a hypothetical hybrid open source-proprietary project. The source code is open but some functional aspects are patented. Anyone who makes a derivative work has a license to use the patent (so forking is okay), but competitors can't make a wholly proprietary version that implements the patented features. The open source license relies on copyright; the patent license gives the hybrid project some leverage against proprietary competitors.

Unlike copyright law, patent law does not recognize independent invention as a defense to infringement. Why should inventions that involve a computer be treated differently than, say, a mouse trap in that regard?

The first working fuel cell was demonstrated in 1839. Their commercial use dates back to 1955. There's plenty of competition in the fuel cell market (the actual market, not this niche product). Patents aren't the problem. The real problem is that, of all the variations on fuel cells out there today, none of them offer a combination of a low operating temperature, low cost, and portability. It's just not a good technology for small-scale, everyday use compared to batteries.

All of the claims in the Micron patent refer to the user "drawing" the geometric pattern. The term "drawing" is not defined in the patent, so a court would likely give the term its ordinary and customary meaning given to the term by those of ordinary skill in the art. Phillips v. AWH Corp., 415 F.3d 1303, 1313 (Fed. Cir. 2005) (en banc). But I don't think "drawing" has a particular technical meaning in this context. The Oxford American Dictionary defines it as to "produce (a picture or diagram) by making lines and marks; produce an image of (someone or something) in such a way."

The Apple unlock mechanism doesn't produce a picture or image or make a line or mark on the screen. The user causes the slider to move, but it doesn't draw a line. Technically the "slide to unlock" text fades out and it could be argued that the user is "drawing" over "slide to unlock" in black, but that's a pretty strained way to look at it. A somewhat firmer interpretation would be that "drawing" can sometimes be used in a metaphorical sense. For example, someone can be said to draw a shape in the air with their finger.

If Micron sued Apple over this patent (or assigned the patent to someone who sued Apple), it's quite possible that the case would hinge on the meaning of that word.

Well let's look at claim 1 of this patent. "A system comprising: a touch screen upon which a user is to enter, by drawing, a geometric pattern in a specified direction to gain access to the system; and a processing circuit coupled to the touch screen to compare the user entered geometric pattern to a predefined geometric pattern stored in a memory."

Certainly some parts of this can be reduced to mathematics. The geometric pattern, obviously, as well as whatever algorithm is used for comparing the input with the pattern. But no amount of math is going to cause a touch screen to appear out of thin air. And if I sit in front of a locked phone with a piece of paper and a pencil, I can do math all day and that phone will remain locked. That's because the patent is not a patent on math. It's a patent on an electronic device that happens to use some mathematical principles in order to function in a certain way.

It's no different from a patent on the design of an airplane wing that defines the shape of the wing in terms of a mathematical function. You can analyze that function, write proofs about it, etc all day and never create an airplane wing because the math is fundamentally separable from the invention that uses it.

Trademark infringement is judged under a likelihood of confusion standard. Note that there does not have to be proof of actual confusion (although that's pretty strong evidence of a likelihood of confusion). So it wouldn't necessarily have to be a perfect copy so long as the typical, reasonably prudent consumer passing by the store would likely be confused as to whether it was an Apple Store or not.

Fake Apple Stores are a thing, so one can see why Apple did this. Whether or not one agrees with the trademarkability of store designs as a policy matter is another issue.

In this case the trademark is defined by the illustration, which is basically a line drawing of an Apple Store minus the logo. The text in the summary is drawn from the "description of mark" field, which is just a description of the image and does not define the trademark. Further, the summary suggests that Apple is individually claiming trademark protection on various features of its store design ('clear glass storefront...' or an 'oblong table with stools...'). This is not the case. The trademark claims the entire design as a whole.

The patent doesn't claim that the screen is itself new or patented. The patent claims the method of displaying a line on any computer screen. It's no different than a patent on, say, a method of catching mice using a bucket of water, a ramp, and a piece of bait dangled above the bucket. It doesn't matter where you get the bucket, the ramp, or the bait. The patent covers the method of using these pre-existing objects together to catch mice.

I'm not trying to have it both ways. This is a long-settled area of the law, codified in the statute. The end users would be directly infringing the patent, and you would likely be liable for indirect infringement. Imagine a patented mechanical device that is held together with screws. If someone sells all of the parts, minus the screws, plus instructions on how to put it together and where to buy the screws, that's indirect infringement. In this hypothetical you're distributing the software knowing that end users will use it in an infringing manner with their computer screens (which, again, could be any kind of computer screen).