ESP Wiki is looking for moderators and active contributors!

Case law in the USA

Some recent case law is documented in Patentability in the USA after Alice

Case law in the USA is the collection of rulings handed down by the courts that deal with patents in the USA. Case law provides the official interpretations of the legislation.

The highest court, the US Supreme Court, has only ruled on certain aspects of the software and patentable subject matter. From the 70s and early 80s, there's Benson, Flook, and Diehr. More recently there's Bilski (2010) and Alice v. CLS (2014) and one important non-software case, Mayo (2012).

A lower court, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) has upheld many software patents but the Bilski and Alice rulings by the Supreme Court should reduce the CAFC's ability to continue doing so.

Chronological list of articles

List of articles on ESP Wiki analysing US court rulings. Newest first:

Possibly interesting

  • O'Reilly v. Morse, (1853) (Wikipedia page)
  • Graham v. John Deere, (1966) 383 U.S. 1, 6 (1966) (Wikipedia page)
  • Laboratory Corp. of America Holdings v. Metabolite Laboratories, Inc., 548 U.S. 124 (2007)
  • NTP v. Research in Motion, Ltd., 397 F. Supp. 2d 785 (E.D. Va. 2005) - nope, isn't case law. Just an example of a troll
  • Diamond v. Chakrabarty, 1980
  • In re Iwahashi, 1990
  • Ex parte Yang-Huffman, Appeal 2007­2130, slip op. at 3 (Bd. Pat. App. & Interf. Oct. 4, 2007)
  • Northern Telecom v. Datapoint, 908 F.2d 931, 940-941 (1990)
  • Prater & Wei[1]
  • "Johnson"[2]

Finding USA court documents

Related pages on ESP Wiki

External links

References