Patent Law Weblog
recent posts
- Judicial Conduct and Disability Committee Has Its Say, Denies Judge Newman’s Latest Request for Review
- PTAB Issues Judgment on Priority in CRISPR Interference
- Parties File Supplemental Priority Statements in CRISPR Interference
- Why the Alice Test is Stupid, Part V: The Goalposts Keep Moving
- Meanwhile, Back at the PTAB with CRISPR – Update
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Category: Patentable Subject Matter
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By Kevin E. Noonan — The highest form of tea leaf-reading is guessing how the Supreme Court will rule based on oral argument. Yet occasionally the Court's questioning suggests general trends and tendencies, and today's argument in Bilski v. Kappos may be one of those times. The claims at issue are directed to a…
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By Kevin E. Noonan — Judge Robert W. Sweet of the Southern District of New York ruled against the defendants' motions to dismiss in Association for Molecular Pathology v. U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (see Opinion). The defendants brought these motions under Federal Rules of Civil Procedure 12(b)(1) (for lack of subject matter jurisdiction),…
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By Kevin E. Noonan — Bans on gene patenting and the possibility of having a court, Congress, or czar declare them banned are all the rage recently, spurred in part by the lawsuit against Myriad Genetics and the University of Utah (among other defendants) in the Federal District Court for the Southern District of…
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Medical Diagnostics Claims Are Patentable Subject Matter By Kevin E. Noonan — Over the past few years, Federal Circuit decisions in In re Bilski and Classen Immunotherapeutics, Inc. v. Biogen Idec, combined with Justice Breyer's dissent in Laboratory Corp. v. Metabolite Labs., Inc. ("LabCorp"), have created more than a frisson of anxiety in the…
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By Kevin E. Noonan — The Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) held a media briefing on Federal policy issues today, with most of BIO's executive staff assembling at BIO headquarters in Washington, D.C. In addition to the media present on site, BIO hosted several more members of the press by teleconference. Jim Greenwood (at left),…
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By Kevin E. Noonan — Some (bad) ideas are a long time a-dyin'. One of the most persistent in biotechnology patent law is the concept of the "tragedy of the anticommons." An intriguing idea when first proposed by Heller and Eisenberg in 1998, it was also frightfully naïve about the "anticommons" effects of circumstances…
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By Kevin E. Noonan — The Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court last week in Bilski v. Doll, the appeal from the Federal Circuit's en banc decision establishing the "machine or transformation" test as the exclusive test for patent eligibility of process claims. BIO was joined on the…
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By Donald Zuhn — Gene patenting. It's a topic that Public Radio just can't seem to get enough of this summer. In June, Dr. Hans Sauer, the Associate General Counsel for Intellectual Property for the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO); Joshua Sarnoff, Professor of the Practice of Law at American University's Washington College of Law;…
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Board Finds Metabolite Claim to be Patentable By Kevin E. Noonan — The most significant non-decision from the Supreme Court in recent memory is Justice Breyer's dissent over the Court's decision to dismiss its granted certiorari petition (as improvidently granted) in the Laboratory Corp. v. Metabolite Laboratories, Inc. case regarding the patent-eligibility of this…
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By Kevin E. Noonan — Academics are useful people — they provoke us to think and rethink our assumptions and the consequences of our institutions and practices, and can expand them in unexpected and frequently useful ways. But they also tend to live in a world constructed within the boundaries of their own skulls,…
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