State rights v. Patent law

snopes writes "Here's an article discussing whether states should be exempt from the same patent laws which US companies must abide by. It's not a terribly exciting read, but important if you're at all concerned with these sorts of issues. The core argument: Patent law is federal and federal law cannot be applied against a state government. Therefore, can a state using unlicensed technology be sued by the patent holder? Of course, there's still the issue of whether this sort of thing should be patented in the first place. " Yeah, it's about as exciting as reading abstracts for academic papers-but it does have an interesting arguement.

Comments

Sovereign Immunity

[Aaron M. Renn]

I don't think this about states' rights. Congress has the power to legislate on patents. This is specific and does not depend on the interstate clause, thus applies to businesses operating in only one state. (The false advertising one probably is based on commerce clause powers and then would possibly not apply to a business not engaged in interstate commerce). The issue here is whether or not you can sue a state for violation of a federal statute in federal court. The constitution says that you basically have to bring suits against states in state court. This grants the states sovereign immunity from lawsuits just like the federal government has. Part of the notion of federalism is that the state governments are not creatures of the federal government and are not subservient to it. Allowing people to bring tort claims against states in federal court essentially shatters federalism because the federal gov't could pass any number of laws that exposed the states to theoretically unlimited damages. (Of course here there is the added question of whether a state operated business enterprise is the same as the state itself).

IANAL and this is not my area of expertise so if anyone has corrections to what I just said, let me know.