Supreme Court Overturns Festo Decision

An anonymous submitter wrote: "On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Festo v. Shoketsu Kinzoku Kogyo Kabushiki upholding the patent law "doctrine of equivalents" which says that patents cover insubstantial variations of a claimed invention. Previously, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit had ruled that the doctrine of equivalents did not apply where the patentee had made ANY changes to his claims during the application process. This week, the Supreme Court reversed, holding that changes made during the application process must be examined individually to see whether they gave up coverage of a particular accused device." Another submitter sent in this good analysis of the decision. Patents are a boring subject, but in general: the Appeals Court's decision in this particular case would have had the effect of making nearly all patents less broad and more specific. The Supreme Court noted the business disruption this would cause, and they are undoubtedly correct about that, but I can't help feeling that our legal system just missed an opportunity to reign in patent abuse.

Comments

Supremacy Clause

[yerricde]

Can you find a law saying that courts have judicial review?

"This Constitution, and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof ... shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby ..." Laws that break the constitution are not "laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof".

Re:Best Supreme Court Opinion in Years

[Zeinfeld]

What was the reasoning behind the earlier Circuit Court decision? Why would the fact that amendments occured during the patent process have anything to do with the later scope of the patent, once issued?

There are several reasons why a patent is ammended in process. One of them is Lemelson type manipulation of the process (he is now a stiff and so the truth can be said of him without fear of libel).

Another common reason is to add to a patent ideas that have been published by others after the original application. Under the US patent office rules such ammendments get the advantage of the original priority date. So if you design a blue widget in January, I read of your design and propose that the same task could be done by a red widget and publish the idea in May, you can go back and ammend your application to cover both Red and Blue widgets even though you didn't think of the Blue widget idea.

And before patent lawyers claim the opposite, I know of many cases in which such patents have issued. They may not be enforceable, but it currently costs about $2 million to defend a patent case while the plantif's case is typically brought on a contingency basis.

If it was possible to recover costs from the people who file perjurous patents and the leeches who act for them I would have more sympathy for those who claim the USPTO is not a racketeing influenced corrupt organization.

The risk for the US is that historically no one country has remained the dominant economic power for all that long. If the US economy has a spell when it is not doing as well as it is currently relative to the world economy the focus of research and development dollars may move overseas again, at which point the dollars extorted from the economy by patent trolls may cease being a minor irritant and may become a major consideration when deciding where to do business. This afternoon I presented some of my work to an F50 company who is one of our partners, during the presentation someone asked what was new since the basic approaches I was using were all well established, only the application domain had changed, "hopefully nothing", I replied, "If there was anything new here, someone would tack it onto a submarine patent and claim to own it". The sad part being that everyone agreed that the strategy is sound. The patent system is not encouraging innovation, it is allowing leeches to collect undeserved taxes.

I would rather deal with Europe's labor laws that the US patent laws.