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3 October 2017Patents

US Supreme Court won’t hear Louis Vuitton or Synopsys cases

The US Supreme Court has denied a petition to revisit the landmark 2014 Alice v CLS Bank decision, while choosing not to assess a parody case filed by Louis Vuitton.

The court’s October 2017 term began yesterday, October 2, when the court released additional orders from its September 25 conference.

It denied certiorari for Synopsys, an electronic design automation company, which had petitioned the court to reassess parts of the Alice decision.

In that decision, the Supreme Court set out a two-step analysis of patentability, the first determining whether the idea is abstract, while the second was labelled the “inventive concept” analysis—to determine whether there is genuine, human contribution to the claimed subject matter.

As reported by WIPR last week, Synopsys petitioned the court to “examine whether an otherwise revolutionary technological breakthrough is not an ‘inventive concept’” under the second step of Alice, merely because the Federal Circuit believed the breakthrough could theoretically be implemented without a computer.

The dispute came after the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled that the method in Synopsys-owned patents relating to logic circuits could be mentally noted or written down. It meant the claims failed the second part of the two-stage test set out in Alice.

Synopsys argued that, in practice, the claimed inventions would have to be performed on a computer to work in a meaningful way, but this was previously rejected and now the case won’t be heard by the Supreme Court either.

“It is not surprising to see the Supreme Court deny certiorari,” said John O’Quinn, partner at Kirkland & Ellis.

He added: “The petition presented yet another section 101 issue, again challenging the Federal Circuit’s approach to finding subject matter is not patent-eligible under the Alice framework.  The Supreme Court does not seem interested in revisiting its 101 jurisprudence any time soon.”

Elsewhere in yesterday’s sitting, the Supreme Court said it would not hear a trademark case between Louis Vuitton and a company selling tote bags featuring cartoon images of the luxury goods.

It means a Federal Circuit ruling which said that the bags by My Other Bag (MOB) did not infringe the luxury brand’s IP remains intact.

California-based MOB sells bags that on one side say “My Other Bag ...” and on the other have a Louis Vuitton design. The company also sells bags that have other luxury brands’ designs on them.

In its August 2016 brief, Louis Vuitton claimed that the case has “never been about any supposed ‘artistic’ activity by MOB” and that it does not comprise “a watershed First Amendment moment”.

However, the Federal Circuit backed the US District Court for the Southern District of New York in rejecting claims that the bags infringed Louis Vuitton’s IP rights.

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