Intellectual Property: Supreme Court Contemporary Decisions (Intellectual Property Law Series)

THIS CASEBOOK contains a selection of recent intellectual property decisions issued by the U.S. Supreme Court. The work includes 19 patent decisions, four copyright decisions, and one trademark decision. The selection of decisions spans from 2005 to the date of publication.

[T]he "first sale" doctrine applies to copies of a copyrighted work lawfully made abroad. Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 133 S. Ct. 1351 (2013). The [ ] doctrine [ ] frees courts from the administrative burden of trying to enforce restrictions upon difficult-to-trace, readily movable goods. And it avoids the selective enforcement inherent in any such effort. Kirtsaeng at 1363. The common-law doctrine makes no geographical distinctions. Ibid.

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[G]enes and the information they encode are not patent eligible. [A] naturally occurring DNA segment is a product of nature and not patent eligible merely because it has been isolated. Ass'n for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad, 133 S. Ct. 2107 (2013).

Laws of nature, natural phenomena, and abstract ideas are not patentable." Mayo, 566 U.S., at ___, 132 S.Ct., at 1293 (internal quotation marks and brackets omitted). Rather, "'they are the basic tools of scientific and technological work'" that lie beyond the domain of patent protection. Id., at ___, 132 S.Ct., at 1293. [W]ithout this exception, there would be considerable danger that the grant of patents would "tie up" the use of such tools and thereby "inhibit future innovation premised upon them." Id., at ___, 132 S.Ct., at 1301. This would be at odds with the very point of patents, which exist to promote creation. Diamond v. Chakrabarty, 447 U.S. 303, 309, 100 S.Ct. 2204, 65 L.Ed.2d 144 (1980) (Products of nature are not created, and "'manifestations... of nature [are] free to all men and reserved exclusively to none'"). Ass'n for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad, Ibid.