This new post by Claire Laporte of Foley Hoag LLP appears on the Health Affairs Blog, as part of a series stemming from the Third Annual Health Law Year in P/Review event held at Harvard Law School on Friday, January 30, 2015.
Do patents nurture or stifle innovation?
In a recent series of decisions, the Supreme Court has begun to express concern that some patents suppress innovation. And it has done so in a number of cases that turn on what used to be a sleepy backwater of the patent law: 35 U.S.C. § 101. This statute says, simply, that “Whoever invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, … may obtain a patent therefor, subject to the conditions and requirements of this title [i.e., the other requirements of the patent law].”
You might think that this language means that all you have to do is figure out whether an invention falls into one of the permitted categories. If it does, it’s something that can be patented (assuming you meet the other requirements — which are numerous). But no! Over the past few decades, the Supreme Court has engrafted a whole new set of judge-made requirements onto this statute: you cannot get a patent on something that is a “law of nature,” a “product of nature,” or an “abstract idea.” And starting in 2010, the Court put real teeth into these doctrines. […]
See the full post here.