Patent Conflicts

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tejas N. Narechania

Patent policy is typically thought to be the product of the Patent and Trademark Office, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, and, in some instances, the Supreme Court. This simple topography, however, understates the extent to which outsiders can shape the patent regime. Indeed, a variety of administrative actors influence patent policy through the exercise of their regulatory authority and administrative power. This Article offers a novel description of the ways in which nonpatent agencies intervene into patent policy. In particular, it examines agency responses to conflicts between patent and other regulatory aims, uncovering a relative preference for complacency (“inaction”) and resort to outside help (“indirect action”) over regulation (“direct action”). This dynamic has the striking effect of shifting authority from nonpatent agencies to patent policymakers, thereby supplanting some regulatory designs with the patent regime’s more general incentives. This Article thus offers agencies new options for facing patent conflict, including an oft-overlooked theory of regulatory authority for patent-related regulation. Such intervention and regulation by nonpatent agencies can give rise to a more efficient and context-sensitive regime that is better aligned with other regulatory goals.

1989 ◽  
Vol 83 (1) ◽  
pp. 86-90
Author(s):  
Rose Cecile Chan

Plaintiffs, Sperry Corp. and Sperry World Trade Inc. (Sperry), received an award from the Iran-United States Claims Tribunal (Tribunal). Upon payment of the award, the United States deducted 2 percent of the total amount pursuant to a directive license issued by the Secretary of the Treasury regarding recovered claims by U.S. nationals against Iran. When plaintiffs challenged the authority of the Treasury to make the deduction and the United States Claims Court announced a preliminary ruling that concurred with plaintiffs’ position, the Executive persuaded Congress to approve legislation authorizing specified percentages to be deducted by the United States from Tribunal awards to U.S. citizens. Responding to the plaintiffs’ challenge to the constitutionality of the newly enacted statute, the United States Claims Court dismissed the suit and, on appeal, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (per Meyer, J.) reversed and held: that the deduction constitutes a taking without compensation in violation of the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution. In September 1988, the United States filed notice of appeal with the Supreme Court.


2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Lemley

It is a fundamental principle of patent law that no one infringes a patentunless they practice the complete invention. Nonetheless, patent courtshave long recognized that focusing only on the party who actually practicesthe invention will sometimes let off the hook the party who most deservesto be held liable. Thus, for over a century patent courts have extendedliability to one who does not himself infringe, but who actively inducesinfringement by another. Since 1952, this principle has been enshrined insection 271(b) of the patent statute. As an idea, it has provenuncontroversial.Surprisingly, however, despite the venerable nature of inducement in patentlaw, the actual content of the inducement requirement has remainedsomething of a mystery. In particular, courts have proven unable to decidetwo fundamental issues - what it means actually to induce infringement, andwhat the inducer must know and intend in order to be liable for acting.Though the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, whichwas created in 1982, now handles all patent appeals, it has not broughtuniformity to either issue. Indeed, there are Federal Circuit opinionstaking diametrically opposed positions on the law of inducement. Thisconfusion is doubly unfortunate given that the Supreme Court has recentlyimported the law of inducement from patent into copyright law. Before weadopt the concept of inducement in copyright cases, it would seem helpfulto know what exactly it means in patent cases.In this article, I set out the fundamental disagreements among the courtsas to the conduct and intent prongs of inducement. I explore the policiesbehind inducement law, and suggest that these disagreements can best beresolved not by picking one side or the other, but by thinking ofinducement as a sliding scale inquiry in which a more specific intent toinfringe is required to find liability if the defendant's conduct isotherwise less egregious. This resolution not only makes policy sense, andintegrates section 271(b) with the rest of the statute, but it may evenhave the virtue of explaining most of the apparently conflicting caselaw.Application of this sliding scale approach also has implications forsecondary liability in copyright law.


2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dan Burk

The opinion of the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, In re Roslin Institute, rejecting patent claims to mammals cloned from somatic cells, was rendered about a month before the United States Supreme Court's decision in Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank International. The Alice opinion explicitly sets out the standard for determining whether an invention falls within statutory patentable subject matter. Thus one is thus left to wonder what the Roslin opinion might have looked like had it been decided only a few weeks later, after the Alice decision was published, with the benefit of the Supreme Court's further direction on patentable subject matter. In this essay I explore whether in hindsight the Alice standard might have dictated a different outcome in Roslin, suggesting how the two-part test articulated by the Supreme Court in Alice might apply to a "products of nature" analysis for cloned mammals. Drawing on that analysis, I then use the Roslin case as a vehicle to highlight certain issues with the Supreme Court's current subject matter jurisprudence as applied to biotechnology. By juxtaposing Dolly with Alice, it becomes clear that the Supreme Court has revivified a number of dormant biotechnology patent problems in the guise of subject matter analysis.


Author(s):  
Keith A Zullow ◽  
Cindy Chang ◽  
Sean Anderson

In Idenix Pharms. LLC v. Gilead Sci. Inc., 941 F.3d 1149 (Fed. Cir. 2019), the Federal Circuit affirmed a judgment of invalidity of a patent claiming methods for treating Hepatitis C virus for, inter alia, lack of enablement. The Supreme Court denied Idenix’s petition for a writ of certiorari, meaning that the Federal Circuit decision stands, and genus claims covering thousands of compounds that were supported by an insufficient number of examples have failed the enablement test not once, but twice. See Wyeth & Cordis Corp. v. Abbott Labs., 720 F.3d 1380 (Fed. Cir. 2013). This case report presents the context surrounding the Federal Circuit’s Idenix decision and the Supreme Court’s decision not to hear the case.


2020 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
pp. 86-93
Author(s):  
Tamon Kusumoto ◽  
Ryo Ogawara ◽  
Kazuyo Igawa ◽  
Kentaro Baba ◽  
Teruaki Konishi ◽  
...  

ABSTRACT We have been studying the effectiveness of direct action, which induces clustered DNA damage leading to cell killing, relative to indirect action. Here a new criterion Direct Ation-Based Biological Effectiveness (DABBLE) is proposed to understand the contribution of direct action for cell killing induced by C ions. DABBLE is defined as the ratio of direct action to indirect action. To derive this ratio, we describe survival curves of mammalian cells as a function of the number of OH radicals produced 1 ps and 100 ns after irradiation, instead of the absorbed dose. By comparing values on the vertical axis of the survival curves at a certain number of OH radicals produced, we successfully discriminate the contribution of direct action induced by C ions from that of indirect action. DABBLE increases monotonically with increasing linear energy transfer (LET) up to 140 keV/μm and then drops, when the survival curves are described by the number of OH radicals 1 ps after irradiation. The trend of DABBLE is in agreement with that of relative biological effectiveness (RBE) of indirect action. In comparison, the value of DABBLE increases monotonically with LET, when the survival curves are described by the number of OH radicals 100 ns after irradiation. This finding implies that the effectiveness of C ion therapy for cancer depends on the contribution of direct action and we can follow the contribution of direct action over time in the chemical phase.


1944 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 266-288
Author(s):  
Robert E. Cushman

On February 15, 1943, Wiley B. Rutledge, Jr., a judge of the United States Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, took the seat on the Supreme Court vacated by the resignation in October, 1942, of Mr. Justice Byrnes. There were no other changes in the Court's personnel. Disagreement among the justices abated somewhat. In only a dozen cases of importance did either four or three justices dissent, as against some thirty cases in the last term. The Court overruled two earlier decisions, both recent; and the reversal in each case was made possible by the vote of Mr. Justice Rutledge.A. QUESTIONS OF NATIONAL POWER1. WAR POWER-CIVIL VERSUS MILITARY AUTHORITYWest Coast Curfew Applied to Japanese-American Citizens. In February, 1942, the President issued Executive Order No. 9066, which authorized the creation of military areas from which any or all persons might be excluded and with respect to which the right of persons to enter, remain in, or leave should be subject to such regulations as the military authorities might prescribe. On March 2, the entire West Coast to an average depth of forty miles was set up as Military Area No. 1 by the Commanding General in that area, and the intention was announced to evacuate from it persons of suspected loyalty, alien enemies, and all persons, aliens and citizens alike, of Japanese ancestry.


2014 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. Serebryakov ◽  
N. Levin ◽  
A. Sokolov ◽  
E. Kamolins

Abstract Application of wind generators opens wide possibilities for raising the efficiency of low- and medium-power wind generators (WGs). The mass of generators in the proposed version is smaller, their reliability higher, while maintenance costs are lower. At the same time, the use of high-energy permanent magnets in generators of enhanced power comes up against some obstacles, which can be overcome through proper orientation of magnetization at creation of a magnetic field in the airgap of electrical machine. In this regard, it might be preferable to use magnets with indirect action on the airgap instead of those with direct action. A convincing example of the former variant is a generator with tangentially oriented magnetization of permanent magnets. In the work, an attempt is done to prove the advantages of such installation in modern low- and medium-power WGs


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