|
high court puts limits on patents
7 May 2007
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court, in its most important patent ruling in years, raised the bar for obtaining patents on new products that combine elements of pre-existing inventions.
If the combination results from nothing more than “ordinary innovation” and “does no more than yield predictable results,” the court said in a unanimous opinion, it is not entitled to the exclusive rights that patent protection conveys. “Were it otherwise,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote in the opinion, “patents might stifle, rather than promote, the progress of useful arts.”
“Granting patent protection to advances that would occur in the ordinary course without real innovation retards progress,” Justice Kennedy said.
Patent law experts said the ruling created a common sense standard that could have a broad impact.
Judges will have more leeway to dismiss patent infringement lawsuits without requiring a jury trial, and patent examiners, who generally grant patent applications unless they find prior references to the same invention, will now feel freer to deny claims, said Matthew Kreeger, an intellectual property lawyer at Morrison and Foerster in San Francisco.
“And we could see thousands of cases asking the Patent Office to re-examine patents it has already granted,” said Mr. Kreeger, who was one of the lawyers who had prepared a brief filed by the Biotechnology Industry Organization in support of the patent. To be eligible for a patent, an invention must be novel, useful and not “obvious” to a person of “ordinary skill” in the field.
The federal government, which had sided with KSR, argued that the Federal Circuit’s approach had led to the granting of too many patents to obvious inventions. Pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry groups, entering the case for Teleflex, argued that innovation would suffer if patents became too hard to defend.
The decision could affect other lawsuits against Microsoft and save it billions because of the global scope of its operations.
The Supreme Court said software should be treated like exported blueprints and schematics.
READ MORE ABOUT THIS: www.nytimes.com, Linda Greenhouse, Barnaby Feder contributed reporting.
|
