EFF: The Supreme Court Should Say No to Patents that Take Old Ideas away from the Public
The Supreme Court Should Say No to Patents that Take Old Ideas away from the Public There is room to debate what makes an invention patentable, but one thing should be uncontroversial: patentable inventions should actually be new. That’s what EFF and the R Street Initiative told the Supreme Court this week in an amicus brief urging it to grant certiorari and reverse the Federal Circuit’s decision in Ariosa v. Illumina [ PDF ]. We explained that the Federal Circuit’s decision is wrong on the law and bad for innovation, access to knowledge, and the patent system. In Ariosa , the Federal Circuit departed from more than a century of case law to uphold a patent that claimed an “invention” that someone else had already described in a published patent application. According to the court, the description didn’t qualify as material that could invalidate the patent being challenged because it did not appear in the “claims”—the section specifying the legal boundaries of the applicant’s righ...