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Like Bilski, this represents a short-term victory for those favoring patent protection but also shows that the Supreme Court is at least trying to impose limits
by grellas 13y ago
Like Bilski, this represents a short-term victory for those favoring patent protection but also shows that the Supreme Court is at least trying to impose limits on the Federal Circuit's idea that basically everything under the sun should be eligible for patent protection.
Here is an informed summing up by Dennis Crouch at PatentlyO: "What are the consequences [of the ruling]? My immediate reaction is that for most practical applications, the Court's holding means that even though the broadest possible biotechnology product claims (to the isolated DNA itself) aren't going to be patentable, the key elements in making and using a biotechnology-based invention are still going to be protectable via patents (Part III of the Court's opinion makes this especially clear). This will allow researchers and competitors a little bit of wiggle room to design around biotechnology patents because they can use the basic isolated sequence but there will still be substantial limitations on what they can do with that isolated sequence. For this reason, I'm skeptical that the Court's opinion will have a negative effect on the incentives for creating biotechnology-based applications. To the contrary: by affirming that cDNA can be patented, it may strengthen the incentives for investing in research in this area." (http://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2013/06/myriad-isolated-dna-out-cdna-in.html http://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2013/06/myriad-isolated-dna-...)
- carbocation 13y agoMy take on this ruling is found here[1], discussed on HN here[2]. > "... by affirming that cDNA can be patented, it may strengthen the incentives for investing in research in this area" If the court had been discussing meaningfully modified DNA, rather than cDNA (which occurs naturally), I'd probably agree with this quotation from Mr. Crouch. As someone who has done molecular biology in an academic research laboratory, it seems as though the Court is using the term "cDNA" to represent some idea slightly different from what scientists mean by cDNA. Or, at least, their rationale for apotheosizing cDNA is confusing. If intron removal is one of the key steps, and intron removal occurs naturally in the cell before the process of cell harvesting and cDNA creation begins, it is confusing (to me) to say that cDNA creation is a patent-worthy "creation". The essential transformation (the removal of introns) is done by nature within the cell without any instruction from the lab tech. cDNA creation–the step that SCOTUS seems to view as key–is performed largely because mRNA is not stable in most convenient aqueous solvents. If mRNA were stable, we'd probably have mRNA libraries instead of cDNA ones. 1 = http://blog.carbocation.com/post/52902698213/supreme-courts-myriad-decision-is-deeply-confused-over http://blog.carbocation.com/post/52902698213/supreme-courts-... 2 = https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5877259 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5877259