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Case law in the USA

Revision as of 08:42, 17 May 2010 by Ciaran (talk | contribs) (Possibly interesting: * Quanta v. LGE (2008) (see: patent exhaustion))

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

The highest court, the US Supreme Court, has not examine patentable subject matter since the 1981 case Diamond v. Diehr. This case was interpreted by some as validating software patents, but this position is far from clear. Since then, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) has upheld many software patents.

A change occurred in 2008 when the CAFC rejected a business method patent in the case in re Bilski. The test they used, known as the machine-or-transformation test, also narrows or closes the scope for patenting software ideas. The Supreme Court is reviewing this new test in the Bilski v. Kappos case.

The main cases

(Cases as the Supreme Court in bold)

Possibly interesting

  • Quanta v. LGE (2008) (see: patent exhaustion)
  • 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) (WP on NTP and WP on RIM)
  • 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)

Finding USA court documents

Related pages on ESP Wiki

External links