Excerpt from my weekly law journal: This has been an exciting week! I put the finishing touches on the Metabolite Laboratories, Inc. v. Laboratory Corp. of America Holdings, 370 F.3d 1354 (Fed. Cir. 2004) research project, and I closed another chapter of my law externship experience.
I will be very interested in reading whether the Supreme Court decides to grant cert on this issue. If it doesn’t, that means that Diamond v. Diehr has been effectively expanded to include protections of correlations between known medical facts and thoughts of a physician in a patent claim.
Further, the case established a standard of infringement that is easy to infringe. Unless the Supreme Court resolves this issue, now all one needs to do is intend to cause acts that would constitute infringement rather than to knowingly infringe the patent.
Lastly, claims in a patent would now be subject to interpretation rather than being limited to the words expressed on its face, making it more difficult to get around a patent without infringing. If the Supreme Court decides not to grant cert, it would be surprising to me that they would allow increased patent litigation as a result of what would be their policy decision to increase protection for patentees on enforcing their patents. Historically, the Court has prevented the floodgates of litigation from opening; now it seems as if they will have kicked in the door. This would indeed be an interesting day for the patent law field.
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