The Supreme Court held unanimously that in a licensee’s declaratory judgment action for non-infringement, the patentee bears the burden of proving infringement — the same burden as in an ordinary infringement suit.
The Supreme Court held that naturally occurring DNA segments are products of nature and not patent-eligible, but that synthetically created cDNA is patent-eligible because it does not exist in that form in nature.
The Supreme Court held unanimously that the patent exhaustion doctrine does not permit a farmer to reproduce patented self-replicating seeds; exhaustion covers only the authorized sale of the original seeds, not progeny crops grown from them.
The Supreme Court held that the Hatch-Waxman Act permits generic drug manufacturers to bring counterclaims to correct overbroad Orange Book use codes that improperly block FDA approval for non-patented uses of a drug.
The Supreme Court held that the Bayh-Dole Act does not automatically transfer title to federally funded inventions to universities; a researcher’s prior contractual assignment to a private company defeated Stanford’s patent claim.
The Supreme Court held that induced patent infringement requires knowledge of the patent, and that the willful blindness doctrine — deliberately avoiding confirmation of a high-probability fact — satisfies that knowledge requirement.
The Supreme Court held that the doctrine of patent exhaustion applies to method patents and that an authorized sale of a product that substantially embodies a patented method exhausts the patent holder’s rights — foreclosing downstream infringement suits against purchasers.
The Supreme Court unanimously rejected the Federal Circuit’s rigid teaching-suggestion-motivation (TSM) test for patent obviousness, holding that courts must apply a flexible, expansive analysis that recognizes multiple reasons why a person of ordinary skill might combine known elements.
The Supreme Court held that Microsoft did not infringe AT&T’s speech processing patents under § 271(f) when it shipped master discs of Windows to foreign manufacturers who then copied and installed the software — because software code, standing alone, is not a ‘component’ that
The Supreme Court held that a patent licensee need not terminate or breach its license agreement before seeking a declaratory judgment that the underlying patent is invalid or not infringed — a licensee under an active license has standing to bring such a challenge.
The Supreme Court unanimously held that courts must apply the traditional four-factor equitable test when deciding whether to grant a permanent injunction in a patent case, rejecting both a categorical rule granting injunctions to prevailing patentees and a categorical rule against injunctions for n
The Supreme Court unanimously held that a patent does not by itself establish market power for antitrust tying purposes; plaintiffs must prove market power directly through evidence of the relevant market.
The Supreme Court held that 35 U.S.C. § 271(e)(1)’s safe harbor exempts from patent infringement all uses of patented compounds that are reasonably related to generating information for an FDA submission, including preclinical studies that do not themselves produce data submitted to the FDA.
The Supreme Court rejected an absolute bar to claiming equivalents after a narrowing claim amendment, instead establishing a flexible presumption that the patentee surrendered equivalents within the amended scope — rebuttable on three specific grounds.
The Supreme Court held that the Federal Circuit lacks appellate jurisdiction over a case when patent law appears only in the defendant’s compulsory counterclaim and is absent from the plaintiff’s well-pleaded complaint.
The Supreme Court held that utility patents under 35 U.S.C. § 101 may be issued to protect plants, including sexually reproducing crops, and that such patents are not displaced by the narrower protections of the Plant Variety Protection Act.
The Supreme Court held that when the Federal Circuit reviews USPTO factual findings, it must apply the Administrative Procedure Act’s ‘substantial evidence’ standard — not the stricter ‘clearly erroneous’ standard applied to district court fact findings — changing the a
The Supreme Court unanimously established a two-part test for the on-sale bar to patentability under § 102(b) — holding that an invention is ‘on sale’ before the critical date when it is (1) the subject of a commercial offer for sale and (2) ready for patenting, resolving a circuit split
The Supreme Court unanimously reaffirmed the doctrine of equivalents and held that prosecution history estoppel applies even to unexplained claim amendments — establishing that when a patent claim is narrowed during prosecution without explanation, courts should presume the amendment was made for a
The Supreme Court unanimously held that the interpretation of patent claims is a question of law for the judge to decide — not a question of fact for the jury — fundamentally establishing that patent claim construction (the Markman hearing) is a judicial function and marking a turning point in how p