Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corp. v. Breckenridge Pharmaceutical, Inc.

by
When the patent owner filed for the 772 patent, the law defined the patent term as 17 years from the date the patent issued. The law was later amended to define the patent term as expiring 20 years from the patent’s earliest effective filing date, Uruguay Round Agreements Act of 1994 (URAA), 108 Stat. 4983. The owner then filed for the related 990 patent. The change in law caused the second patent to expire earlier than the first patent. The owner concedes that the claimed inventions in the two related patents are obvious variants of each other. The district court invalidated the 772 patent based on obviousness-type double patent; the invalidating reference, the 990 patent, was filed and issued after, but expired before, the 772 patent. The Federal Circuit reversed. The patents are governed by different patent term statutory regimes; the correct framework is to apply the traditional obviousness-type double patenting practices extant in the pre-URAA era to the pre-URAA patent and look to that patent’s issuance date as the reference point for obviousness-type double patenting. Under this framework, and because a change in patent term law should not truncate the term statutorily assigned to the pre-URAA 772 patent, the 990 patent is not a proper double patenting reference. View "Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corp. v. Breckenridge Pharmaceutical, Inc." on Justia Law