Since I specialise in IT/IP law, I'll explain the gist
1) Court did not disallow on basis of novelty or inventiveness
2) Instead they ruled that it was outside statutory subject matter
3) in essence it is a metabolic equation with set points discovered (therefore natural law)
Supreme Court's recent decision in In re Bilski, process claims that are directed to "abstract ideas" are unpatentable subject matter. In contrast, applications of abstract ideas can be patented. Whilst on one hand Mayo v Prometheus may have rolled back the borders of subject matter (metabolic regulatory pathways), on the other hand it did so because the process of informing doctor was "obvious". We discussed this on IPprofessionals LinkedIn group and the general conclusion was that this decision adds more confusion and less predictability to diagnostic methods. Conjecture is that if you change the external decision loop (say to lookup a database depending on ethnic subgroup) then it may be a new application of the discovery.
In summary, a moral victory but can still be potentially legally worked around.
Lawrence
http://www.linkedin.com/in/drllau
On Thursday, 22 March 2012 07:07:00 UTC+13, Cory Geesaman wrote:
Most of you that are interested in this have likely already heard about it, but for anyone who hasn't - the supreme court took a pretty big step in terms of patent reform (and did it unanimously):--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "DIYbio" group.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/diybio/-/gKbXuQWSR8oJ.
To post to this group, send email to diybio@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to diybio+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/diybio?hl=en.
0 comments:
Post a Comment