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This case was not handled by our firm. However, if you have any questions regarding this case, or any business law matter, please contact Joseph Maya at 203-221-3100 or by email at JMaya@MayaLaw.com.
Supreme Court justices were scratching their heads Monday over new government procedures making it easier for companies or individuals to challenge patents without a long and costly fight in federal court.
That is because the new process, which takes place at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, is guided by different legal standards than those followed by the courts. As a result, the Patent Office and a federal judge could each review the same patent and reach opposite conclusions.
“It’s a very extraordinary animal in legal culture to have two different proceedings addressing the same question that lead to different results,” said Chief Justice John Roberts during an hourlong oral argument in a case involving a patent claim over an invention that alerts drivers when they are speeding.
“It just seems to me that that’s a bizarre way to decide a legal question,” the chief justice added.
The case, which is being followed closely by top U.S. companies, comes after a congressional overhaul of the nation’s patent laws in 2011. The court is considering whether the patent-office rules need to conform with the legal standards in place in the courts.
Drug companies and others, such as 3M Co., Exxon Mobile Corp. and Monsanto Co., which rely on strong legal protections for intellectual property, say the process is too friendly to patent challengers and creates legal uncertainty that could chill investment in innovations.
Patents give their owners exclusive rights to an invention for 20 years, meaning they can prevent other parties from using or copying the invention without permission or paying for the right to use it.
‘It just seems to me that that’s a bizarre way to decide a legal question.’
Despite Chief Justice Roberts’s concerns about the new process, Justice Stephen Breyer said it is possible the new legal rules make sense if the government’s goal is to weed out bad patents and take on patent-licensing firms, which critics call “patent trolls.” Such firms buy up patents in hopes of making money by licensing them or suing others for infringement.
From that perspective, the Patent Office’s approach “is for the benefit of those people who were suffering from too many patents that shouldn’t have been issued in the first place,” Justice Breyer said.
He and others asked questions that cut both ways, making the outcome tough to call.
The high court case centers on Cuozzo Speed Technologies LLC, which owns a patent for an invention that alerts drivers when they are speeding. GPS technology company Garmin Ltd.initiated a challenge at the Patent Office, which invalidated the Cuozzo patent after finding that the invention wasn’t truly innovative when viewed against other prior technologies.
Cuozzo lawyer Garrard Beeney said the new administrative procedures require Patent Office judges to interpret patents in a way that makes them easier to invalidate, which deprives “patent owners of their property rights based on pretending the patent means something that it doesn’t mean.”
Justice Department lawyer Curtis Gannon, defending the Patent Office, said the agency’s approach would improve the quality of patents, as Congress intended. He said the administrative patent-challenge process wasn’t supposed to be just like a court proceeding, which meant it didn’t have to follow all the same legal rules.
A decision is expected by the end of June.
This case was not handled by our firm. However, if you have any questions regarding this case, or any business law matter, please contact Joseph Maya at 203-221-3100 or by email at JMaya@MayaLaw.com.