[DannyBee]

"In this case, the Federal Circuit Court did what amounted a wholesale second-guessing of what the jury concluded about the facts here."

It's worse than that. They are supposed to be applying ninth circuit law, and they roundly haven't throughout the entire appeals.

They've made a complete mess of it. First in copyrightability, and now fair use. There are even ninth circuit judges who have spoken out about this.

[scoggs]

For someone who is very much on the outside of understanding this situation, if you think you know enough to comment on it overall, would you say that they are mishandling it due to generally misunderstanding the gravity of the verdicts they are handing out or is it more to do with not precisely understanding the technology, what goes into creating such technology, how technology is propagated and improved, and how that diaspora of code and information winds up becoming the open or closed source "fabric" of what we know as computing today?

[DannyBee]

They just think the ninth circuit is wrong. They are reasonably well informed, they just disagree.

People very often make the mistake of assuming two people with the same data will form the same opinion, and that where people disagree, it must be due to not understanding the data/etc.

In my experience, this is very wrong :)

[scoggs]

Thank you. I can totally understand that. I appreciate it.

[DannyBee]

Of course.

I've met the ex-Chief Judge of the federal circuit, Randall Rader, a number of times (he also taught a class i took in law school at GWU).

He's definitely not stupid, is cognizant of how people view his decisions (he said "they loved me when i wrote nintendo vs. atari and hated me when i wrote other things"), and really did believe he is making things better.

Of course, i strongly disagree, but like i said, it's not like he doesn't understand the issues.

[wtallis]

Can the Ninth Circuit itself petition the Supreme Court to intervene and stop the Federal Circuit from making a hash of Ninth Circuit law?

[dragonwriter]

> Can the Ninth Circuit itself petition the Supreme Court to intervene and stop the Federal Circuit from making a hash of Ninth Circuit law?

Technically, this doesn't have any effect on 9th Circuit law because CAFC decisions applying (and I use that term loosely, here) a particular Circuit’s law do not form new binding precedent for courts in that circuit (or even precedent binding on the CAFC itself in future cases applying the same law.)

But, no, the Ninth Circuit can't intervene that way, though tension between Ninth Circuit precedent and a decision, even if non-binding on other courts, in the CAFC presents an issue similar to a conflict between circuits that would ordinarily seem to weigh in favor of the Supreme Court taking the case on appeal, since avoiding effectively having different systems of federsl law applied to different cases is one reason the Supreme Court exercised it's discretion to hear appeals. It seems certain that Google will appeal this.