The American Axle case is critical to the future of patent law as we know it. It really covers the essence of what is patentable. Under the current ruling, the Wright Brothers would not have been able to patent their flying machine because it uses the laws of nature. The Supreme Court needs to clean up the divergent rulings, which sows dysfunction to our business community, and clarify our system so that is understandable and functional. A reversal by the Supreme Court, and I believe that WDDD will get new life for its patent claims, as the Court of Appeals will not be able to ignore Supreme Court precedent. And neither will Casper if it ends up back in her lap.
The Supreme Court has an obvious conservative bias now, and should favor the establishment and preservation of our intellectual property rights system. So despite the short term loss imposed by Casper, in the end, justice should prevail. Or not, and we can have an IP system that becomes basically meaningless.
Lastly, I was(and am) an investor in AMRN---another case where a company did everything to preserve their IP rights, spent hundreds of millions to do so, only to get sued by generic drug makers and ultimately lose their IP protection. Our IP system is broken and needs to be fixed.