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Case law in the USA

Revision as of 17:07, 23 May 2012 by Ciaran (talk | contribs) (remove note about Bilski - it wasn't that much of a world-changer in the end (looking back two years later))

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 not directly examined the question of the patentability of software ideas, but it has taken decisions on closely related patentable subject matter in a triplet of cases in the 70s and early 80s (Benson, Flook, Diehr), and in the 2010 Bilski v. Kappos case.

A lower court, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) has upheld many software patents.

The main cases

Most recent first; cases at the Supreme Court in bold*:

Possibly interesting

  • Quanta v. LGE (2008, USA) (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)
  • 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