Thursday 23 November 2017 5:00pm to 6:00pm
Faculty of Law, B16
About
Speaker
Martin J Adelman, Theodore and James Pedas Family Professor IP & Technology Law – George Washington University Law School
Abstract
The talk will focus on the United States patent eligibility doctrine relating to natural laws and products of nature under Section 101. I will argue that the law can be best understood by focusing on two Supreme Court cases. The first from 1948 and by far the most important is Funk Bros. Seed Co. Kalo Inoculant Co., 333 U.S. 127 (1948), where by a vote of 6 to 3 the Supreme Court treated a key discovery made by the inventor as prior art and then correctly found that if that discovery was in the prior art, the rest of what the inventor did was obvious. The second case is very recent and discusses the Court's current approach to its prior holdings, Kimble v. Marvel Entertainment, LLC, 135 S.Ct. 2401 (2015). In Kimbel the Court explained that it took extraordinary circumstances to compel it to overrule its prior decisions. Thus, we can at least understand the poorly reasoned recent decisions of Mayo Collaborative Services v. Prometheus Laboratories Inc., 132 S. Ct. 1289 (2012) and Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics Inc., 133 S.Ct. 2107 (2013).
About the speaker
Professor Adelman is currently the Theodore and James Pedas Family Professor of Intellectual Property and Technology Law and Co-Director of the Dean Dinwoodey Center for Intellectual Property Studies at George Washington University Law School. Before a career in academia he practiced for several years as a patent attorney in the Detroit area. The current focus of his teaching and scholarship is in the field of patent law. He has written many law review articles on patent law and patent-antitrust law. From 1977 to 1988 he was one of the co-authors and from 1988-2013 the sole author of the continuously updated nine volume treatise on patent law entitled Patent Law Perspectives. He is a co-author of Cases and Materials on Patent Law and Global Issues in Patent Law. He has testified as an expert in patent law in about 190 patent infringement cases and has lectured at conferences around the world. In addition to his regular three patent law courses at GW, he teaches patent law on a regular basis at Munich Intellectual Property Law Center, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Bar-Ilan University and the University of Washington.