A fair argument would be that author of the article interpreted the question differently than Hogan did, and should have been more charitable to Hogan.
But your argument that the Groklaw commentator interpreted the question in the same narrow way as Hogan, and does not understand the basics of patent law, is ridiculous.
The author of the article clearly posed a question about subject matter patentability rather than patent validity, given the terminology he used. Hogan responded with a correct statement of the law of subject matter patentability.
If the author had intended to ask a different question, he should have asked a different question. In general, the Groklaw coverage suffers from a lack of precision in writing. Law is all about breaking down a complex dispute into distinct questions, answering them separately, then synthesizing a result from answers to those distinct questions. Groklaw's coverage is very fuzzy about which legal questions it is talking about at any given time.
The term "patentability" also applies to inventions, and the questioner did not specify "subject matter patentability", which is only one of several factors that must be considered in deciding if a particular innovation is patentable. In fact, I would say that the question's phrasing makes it pretty clear that the intended meaning was patentability of the invention, not subject matter. To quote page 46 of the final jury instructions:
>Not all innovations are patentable. A utility patent claim is invalid if the claimed invention would have been obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the field at the time of invention.
So again, it is reasonable to say that Hogan may have simply misinterpreted the question he was being asked, and that whether he understood the jury instructions cannot be gleaned from this exchange. It is not reasonable to say that Hogan's interpretation of the question was correct and that Groklaw's interpretation was wrong.
I guess I see your interpretation, but that makes it a weird question. "Patentability" in that sense encompasses both legal questions and factual questions. A jury can't really consider the "patentability" of an invention because some of the elements of "patentability" aren't jury questions. They can only consider specific elements like obviousness, novelty, usefulness.
At best the interviewer asked an ambiguous question and the foreman gave a reasonable answer. In any case, this would all be obviated if Groklaw and the media were precise in their use of the terminology. The lack of precision in their discussion is really what makes me question the depth of their understanding of the law.
But your argument that the Groklaw commentator interpreted the question in the same narrow way as Hogan, and does not understand the basics of patent law, is ridiculous.