Supreme Court limits patent rights of university research
What was true in 1790, the Supreme Court ruled Monday, is true still: An inventor owns his invention.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said that a 1980 federal statute allocating patent rights involving federally funded research did not change that basic tenet. And so Stanford University does not fully own patents that led to the development of a widely used human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) test, the court ruled in a 7 to 2 decision .
Stanford researchers had worked with a private company on a technique to measure the amount of HIV in a person’s blood, which led to a test kit marketed by Roche Molecular Systems.
The case was closely watched by universities, private research and development companies and the federal government, which often jointly conduct research.
The case was one of two business rulings from the court Monday, both written by Roberts. The other removed an obstacle so that a group of investors can move forward with a class-action lawsuit claiming that deceitful actions by Halliburton resulted in a decline in stock prices.
The Stanford case involved a university researcher, Mark Holodniy, and a California biotech company called Cetus. In the 1980s, the company developed a technique — polymerase chain reaction, or PCR — that allowed billions of copies of DNA sequences to be made from a small sample of blood.
When Holodniy went to work at Stanford, he signed an agreement giving the university “right, title and interest in” inventions that came from his research. School officials arranged for him to conduct research at Cetus. But he had to sign an agreement there allowing Cetus the right to inventions made “as a consequence” of his access to the company’s PCR techniques.
Holodniy returned to Stanford, which had received money from the National Institutues of Health for the research, to fine-tune the research with colleagues. The university secured three patents to the blood-quantifying techniques.
Meanwhile, Roche acquired Cetus and its rights and developed a test kit that is used worldwide.
Stanford sued, citing the federal Bayh-Dole Act, governing inventions that result from federal funding. It contended that because of the law, Holodniy could not assign his interests to Cetus.
But Roberts said Stanford was reading the law to be far broader than Congress intended.
“Although much in intellectual property law has changed in the 220 years since the first Patent Act, the basic idea that inventors have the right to patent their inventions has not,” Roberts wrote.
John G Roberts Jr - News
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One day after Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. helped President Obama bungle the oath of office on Inauguration Day 2009, the president held a do-over at the White House out of “an abundance of caution” over constitutional hiccups.
Opinion analysis: The fading “exclusionary rule” at the nclawtalk blog
The Court majority, whatever its current size, does not yet seem ready to cast aside altogether the “exclusionary rule” — a Fourth Amendment interpretation that dates back 97 years (although Justice Antonin Scalia, in particular, has questioned the need to retain it). The rule, in its simplest form, bars evidence from being used in criminal trials if the police obtained it illegally. What has been happening lately — and continued full force in Davis — is that the Court majority is sharply narrowing the definition of police conduct that it considers illegal, and is seeking to assure that more evidence gets in. As a result, the “exclusionary rule” is, case by case, excluding less and less evidence from trials.
That, of course, is part of the goal of the Court majority. Increasiingly, it has dwelled upon the “social cost” of excluding evidence that can be strong proof of guilt, resulting in the release of actual or potentially dangerous criminals. The majority’s conceern over that cost has led it, for example, to bring into the analysis a form of cost/benefit analysis, with the weight heavier on the cost side.
This had been a trend that now-retired Justices David H. Souter and John Paul Stevens regularly resisted, and in recent years they and Justices Stephen G. Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg predictably were joined in dissent. When the Davis decision emerged on June 16, Souter’s and Stevens’ replacements did not dissent.
Stevens’ replacement, Justice Elena Kagan, joined without qualification the majority opinion written by Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr. Also joining were the same four who have also been in the majority in the recent trend, Justice Scalia, Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., and Justices Anthony M. Kennedy and Clarence Thomas.
Souter’s replacement, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, did not sign onto the Alito opinion, but did vote to support its result — allowing the use of evidence that was obtained by police using a method that was legal at the time, but that was later ruled a Fourth Amendment violation by the Supreme Court. Justice Sotomayor made an effort, in her separate opinion, to try to cut back on the sweep of the Alito opinion, but since no one joined her writing and Alito had six votes for his opinion anyway, her views took nothing away from the sweep of the ruling.
Dissenting alone were Justices Breyer and Ginsburg. In an opinion written by Breyer, the dissenters argued that the majority had now gone too far to excuse police techniques that turn out to be illegal, because of the “good faith” belief of the officers that they were acting legally. The trend, the dissent said, ”will swallow the exclusionary rule.
John G Roberts Jr - Bookshelf
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The 1998 briefing was presented by Theodore B. Olson and John G. Roberts, Jr., both nationally recognized members of the Bar of the United States Supreme ...United States Reports
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John Glover Roberts, Jr. ( born January 27, 1955) is the 17th and ... [edit] Bibliography of articles by John G. Roberts Jr. The University of Michigan Law ...
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John Glover Roberts Jr. ( born in Buffalo, New York, 1955) is the 17th Chief Justice of ... This article uses material from the Wikipedia article "John G. Roberts, Jr. ...
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News about John G. Roberts Jr. Commentary and archival information about John G. Roberts Jr. from The New York Times.
Roberts, John G., Jr.: Biography from Answers.com
John G. Roberts, Jr. , U.S. Supreme Court Justice / Jurist Born: 27 January 1955 Birthplace: Buffalo, New York Best Known As: 17th U.S