The Supreme Court held that appellate courts must apply clear-error review to subsidiary factual findings underlying patent claim construction, while legal conclusions remain subject to de novo review.
The Supreme Court held that patent claims are indefinite and invalid if they fail to inform a skilled artisan with reasonable certainty about the scope of the invention, rejecting the Federal Circuit’s overly lenient ‘insolubly ambiguous’ standard.
The Supreme Court held that §285 ‘exceptional case’ fee-shifting requires only that the case stands out from others in the substantive strength of a party’s position or the unreasonable manner of litigation, rejecting the Federal Circuit’s rigid Brooks Furniture two-prong tes
The Supreme Court held that appellate courts must review §285 exceptional case determinations for abuse of discretion — not de novo — deferring to district courts that are best positioned to evaluate litigation conduct over the life of a case.
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.