United States patent law
Under United States law, a patent is a right granted to the inventor of a (1) process, machine, article of manufacture, or composition of matter, (2) that is new, useful, and non-obvious.
England adopts Statute of Monopolies, which has been acknowledged as a legal predecessor of the US patent law.
It is believed that, unlike most parts of the US Constitution, which were derived from the British legal tradition, the IP clause was based on the French practice.
Subsequent case law developed rudimentary requirements for non-obviousness (Hotchkiss v. Greenwood), subject matter eligibility (Le Roy v. Tatham), written description (O’Reilly v. Morse) and the doctrine of equivalents (Winans v. Denmead).
Sherman Antitrust Act introduced some remedies to limit abuses of patent monopoly.
The SCOTUS under William O. Douglas developed case law on non-obviousness (see flash of genius) and subject matter eligibility to limit proliferation of weak patents.
US Congress established an inter partes reexamination to allow the USPTO to review validity of issued patents with participation of third party challengers.
In eBay v. MercExchange the SCOTUS ended the Federal Circuit’s practice of liberally granting injunctions in cases of alleged patent infringement.
The SCOTUS created uncertainty in the non-obviousness determination by mixing it up with predictability in KSR v Teleflex, thus overruling "a clear, bright-line test in § 103 obviousness inquiries such as teaching-suggestion-motivation".
[6] Nevertheless, many legal commentators praised the ruling as the need for raising the non-obviousness bar was widely recognized.
In Quanta v. LG Electronics the Supreme Court reversed the Federal Circuit’s ruling and strengthened patent exhaustion doctrine.
In a move widely regarded as directed against patent trolls, the SCOTUS's decision in Octane Fitness, LLC v. ICON Health & Fitness, Inc. made it easier to recover attorney fees from plaintiffs, who initiate and lose in "frivolous" patent lawsuits.
[8] Most of the US patent law is codified in Title 35 of the United States Code, as authorized by Article One, section 8, clause 8, which states: The Congress shall have power ... To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;.
Although this statement is superficially similar to intellectual property clauses in the constitutions of other countries, the US patent system has several peculiarities: The US also has an extensive body of case law comprising federal court precedents that have accumulated over more than 200 years.
Patent validity can be challenged in the same US Federal District courts, as a declarative judgement or counter-claim of non-infringement.
There are four types of "anything" (i.e. of statutory categories of inventions): a process, a machine (usually implies moving parts), (an article of) manufacture (usually implies no moving parts, e.g. textile fabric or a chair), a composition of matter (chemicals, materials), as well as improvements thereof.
However, in 1991 in Amgen v. Chugai Pharmaceutical the CAFC concluded that genes isolated from their natural environment were patentable.
[23] This practice came to an end in 2013 when the Supreme Court decided in Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, Inc. (2013) that "mere isolation of genes does not qualify for patent protection".
At the same time the Court allowed patenting of complementary DNA without introns, since "it does not exist" in nature.
[24] Similarly, inventions based on routine applications of discoveries (such as that different people metabolize the same drug at different rates as in Mayo Collaborative Services v. Prometheus Laboratories, Inc., or that pregnant woman's blood contains DNA of fetus' father as in Ariosa v. Sequenom) is not patent-ineligible in the US, since the new elements in such inventions are not "made" but rather "discovered" by man.
Although the presence of such "discoveries" helps patentees to meet the non-obviousness requirement, an additional man-made contribution (called "inventive concepts" in Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank International) is required to limit this discovery to a patentable invention.
The practical approach was developed later by the US Supreme Court in Graham v. John Deere Co. in 1966 and in KSR v Teleflex in 2006.
[32] Litigation in the Federal District Courts remains the main remedy for patent infringement.
The ITC is an agency of the U.S. federal government empowered to enforce patent holders' rights under Section 337 of the Tariff Act of 1930.
In contrast to courts, which have a wide range of remedies at their disposal, including monetary damages, the ITC can grant only two forms of remedy: exclusion orders barring infringing products from being imported into the United States, and cease-and-desist orders preventing the defendants (known as respondents) in the ITC action from importing infringing products into the United States.
The decisions of the CAFC can be appealed to the US Supreme Court, but only on discretionary basis via a petition for a writ of certiorari.
All others—petroleum, machinery, fabricated metal products, primary metals, electrical equipment, instruments, office equipment, motor vehicles, rubber, and textiles—have a percentage of twenty-five or lower, with the last four of those industries believing none of their inventions relied on the patent system to be introduced or developed.
