On October 31, IPWatchdog posted commentary by Francesca LaMontagne in its article “What Scares You? A Few of the Most Frightening Developments in IP Law.”

Francesca commented, “A scary development in patent law is the consistently fluctuating unknowns surrounding Section 101. Recently, in American Axle v. Neapco (Fed. Cir. 2020), a patent was invalidated under 101, despite having what many people may view as concrete claims in the mechanical arts. The Court ruled the claims were directed to a judicial exception-natural law because Hooke’s law (spring-force equation), while not directly recited in the claims, was inherently present. The court applied a new test dubbed the ‘Nothing More’ test. If the claim is an application of the natural law and ‘nothing more,’ then it is not patent eligible subject matter. The court stated that the claimed method did not have the requisite physical structure, nor were the claims directed to achieving a result based on the application of Hooke’s law rather than on how Hooke’s law was applied. It seems no patent is affirmatively safe from potential invalidation regardless of its field of invention. Ironically, it was in a letter from Sir Isaac Newton to Robert Hooke that Newton wrote, ‘If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.'”

Read the article here.