Chapter eight discusses the enforcement of patent rights through suits for patent infringement. Without the ability to enforce patent rights against infringers there would be no incentive to seek patents, and thus no incentive to disclose discoveries to the public. As a result, the Patent Act gives several causes of action against both direct and indirect infringers.
In order to determine whether a patent has been infringed, the precise scope of the patent’s claims must be determined in a process called claim construction. As you will see, claim construction is often the focal point of an infringement case, and the district court’s claim construction is often appealed–and almost as often reversed by the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. As you read these cases, it may be helpful to go back to the patents at issue and retrace the claim construction rationale of the district and appellate courts.
- See 35 USC 271
- Markman v. Westview Investments (Markman II), 517 U.S. 370 (1996)
- Vitronics v. Conceptronics, 90 F.3d 1576 (Fed. Cir.1996)
- Graver Tank v. Linde Air Prods., 339 U.S. 605 (1950)
- Patent 2,043,960
- Patent 1,754,566
- Patent 1,467,825
- Warner-Jenkinson v. Hilton Davis Chemical, 520 U.S. 17 (1997)
- Festo v. Shoketsu Kinzoku Kogyo Kabushiki, 535 U.S. 722 (2002)
- Al-Site v. VSI International, 174 F.3d 1308 (Fed. Cir. 1999)
- Hewlett-Packard v. Bausch & Lomb, 909 F.2d 1464 (Fed. Cir.1990)
- C.R. Bard v. Advanced Cardiovascular Systems, 911 F.2d 670 (Fed. Cir.1990)
- Eli Lilly v. American Cyanamid, 82 F.3d 1568 (Fed. Cir.1996)
- Exxon Chemical Patents v. Lubrizol, 64 F.3d 1553 (Fed. Cir.1995)
- Applied Materials v. Advanced Semiconductor Material America, 98 F.3d 1563 (Fed. Cir.1996)
- Genentech v. Wellcome Foundation, 29 F.3d 1555 (Fed. Cir.1994)
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