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In United States patent law, patent misuse is a patent holder's use of a patent to restrain trade beyond enforcing the exclusive rights that a lawfully obtained patent provides. If a court finds that a patent holder committed patent misuse, the court may rule that the patent holder has lost the right to enforce the patent. Patent misuse that restrains economic competition substantially can also violate United States antitrust law.
Under United States law, a patent is a right granted to the inventor of a (1) process, machine, article of manufacture, or composition of matter, (2) that is new, useful, and non-obvious. A patent is the right to exclude others, for a limited time from profiting from a patented technology without the consent of the patent holder. Specifically, it is the right to exclude others from: making, using, selling, offering for sale, importing, inducing others to infringe, applying for an FDA approval, and/or offering a product specially adapted for practice of the patent.
Robert Pitofsky was an American lawyer and politician who was the chairman of the Federal Trade Commission of the United States from April 11, 1995, to May 31, 2001. He had previously been Dean of the Georgetown University Law Center from 1983 to 1989, and was Dean Emeritus at the time of his death.
The exhaustion doctrine, also referred to as the first sale doctrine, is a U.S. common law patent doctrine that limits the extent to which patent holders can control an individual article of a patented product after a so-called authorized sale. Under the doctrine, once an authorized sale of a patented article occurs, the patent holder's exclusive rights to control the use and sale of that article are said to be "exhausted," and the purchaser is free to use or resell that article without further restraint from patent law. However, under the repair and reconstruction doctrine, the patent owner retains the right to exclude purchasers of the articles from making the patented invention anew, unless it is specifically authorized by the patentee to do so.
KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 U.S. 398 (2007), is a decision by the Supreme Court of the United States concerning the issue of obviousness as applied to patent claims.
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Quanta Computer, Inc. v. LG Electronics, Inc., 553 U.S. 617 (2008), is a case decided by the United States Supreme Court in which the Court reaffirmed the validity of the patent exhaustion doctrine. The decision made uncertain the continuing precedential value of a line of decisions in the Federal Circuit that had sought to limit Supreme Court exhaustion doctrine decisions to their facts and to require a so-called "rule of reason" analysis of all post-sale restrictions other than tie-ins and price fixes. In the course of restating the patent exhaustion doctrine, the Court held that it is triggered by, among other things, an authorized sale of a component when the only reasonable and intended use of the component is to engage the patent and the component substantially embodies the patented invention by embodying its essential features. The Court also overturned, in passing, that the exhaustion doctrine was limited to product claims and did not apply to method claims.
Sakraida v. Ag Pro Inc., 425 U.S. 273 (1976), was a unanimous 1976 Supreme Court decision holding a claimed invention obvious because it "simply arranges old elements with each performing the same function it had been known to perform, although perhaps producing a more striking result than in previous combinations."
Mayo v. Prometheus, 566 U.S. 66 (2012), was a case decided by the Supreme Court of the United States that unanimously held that claims directed to a method of giving a drug to a patient, measuring metabolites of that drug, and with a known threshold for efficacy in mind, deciding whether to increase or decrease the dosage of the drug, were not patent-eligible subject matter.
Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank International, 573 U.S. 208 (2014), was a 2014 United States Supreme Court decision about patent eligibility of business method patents. The issue in the case was whether certain patent claims for a computer-implemented, electronic escrow service covered abstract ideas, which would make the claims ineligible for patent protection. The patents were held to be invalid, because the claims were drawn to an abstract idea, and implementing those claims on a computer was not enough to transform that abstract idea into patentable subject matter.
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Evans v. Eaton, 20 U.S. 356 (1822), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court held, chiefly, that a patent on an improved machine must clearly describe how the machine differs from the prior art.
Kimble v. Marvel Entertainment, LLC, 576 U.S. 446 (2015), is a significant decision of the United States Supreme Court for several reasons. One is that the Court turned back a considerable amount of academic criticism of both the patent misuse doctrine as developed by the Supreme Court and the particular legal principle at issue in the case. Another is that the Court firmly rejected efforts to assimilate the patent misuse doctrine to antitrust law and explained in some detail the different policies at work in the two bodies of law. Finally, the majority and dissenting opinions informatively articulate two opposing views of the proper role of the doctrine of stare decisis in US law.
J. E. M. Ag Supply, Inc. v. Pioneer Hi-Bred International, Inc., 534 U.S. 124 (2001), was a decision of the United States Supreme Court holding for the first time that utility patents may be issued for crops and other flowering plants under 35 U.S.C. § 101. The Supreme Court rejected the argument that the exclusive ways to protect these plants are under the Plant Variety Protection Act (PVPA), 7 U.S.C. § 2321, and the Plant Patent Act of 1930 (PPA), 35 U.S.C. §§ 161-164.
Brulotte v. Thys Co., 379 U.S. 29 (1964), was a Supreme Court of the United States decision holding that a contract calling for payment of patent royalties after the expiration of the licensed patent was misuse of the patent right and unenforceable under the Supremacy Clause, state contract law notwithstanding. The decision was widely subjected to academic criticism but the Supreme Court has rejected that criticism and reaffirmed the Brulotte decision in Kimble v. Marvel Entertainment, LLC.
Henry v. A.B. Dick Co., 224 U.S. 1 (1912), was a 1912 decision of the United States Supreme Court that upheld patent licensing restrictions such as tie-ins on the basis of the so-called inherency doctrine—the theory that it was the inherent right of a patent owner, because he could lawfully refuse to license his patent at all, to exercise the "lesser" right to license it on any terms and conditions he chose. In 1917, the Supreme Court overruled the A.B. Dick case in Motion Picture Patents Co. v. Universal Film Mfg. Co.,
Amazon. com, Inc. v. Barnesandnoble. com, Inc., 337 F.3d 1024, was a court ruling at the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. The ruling was an important early cyberlaw precedent on the matter of the technologies that enable e-commerce and whether such technologies are eligible for patent protection.
References
- ↑ John Marshall Law School web site, Volume 1, Issue 1, Fall 2001 Archived 2007-10-08 at the Wayback Machine . Consulted on February 20, 2007.
- ↑ See, e.g., Enzo Biochem, Inc. v. Gen-Probe Inc., 42 Fed. Appx. 439, 452 (Fed. Cir. 2002) (citing Harold C. Wegner, An Enzo White Paper: A New Judicial Standard for a Biotechnology “Written Description” Under 35 U.S.C. § 112, ¶1, 1 J. Marshall Rev. Intell. Prop. L. 254, 263 [ permanent dead link ] (2002)).