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It seems the biggest issue is that you can patent "unaligned loads" in a way that covers both a hardware instruction and software fault handler.

These are very different things. The software fault handler doesn't even do unaligned loads, naturally.

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As I understand it, patents cover results and not so much mechanisms. It's just that people tend to listen the intermediate results in such detail as to appear that they cover mechanisms.

Which is, of course, fucking insane, but nobody seems to want to act on that.

If it covers results, what about the virtual ISAs that allow you to load data from any address of a byte-adressed memory and their implementations include optimizations?

The patent doesn't cover the result of an unaligned load. It covers the specific mechanism of doing an unaligned load using two instructions and a shifter to get the two pieces into the right place in the target register. You can read the claims here: https://www.google.com/patents/US4814976.

That the court considered a software implementation of this to also be in violation again underscores how nutzo that is.

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