Smoke Signals or Smokescreen: The Ultramercial GVR

After the Supreme Court decided that the personalized medicine method claims at issue in Mayo Collaborative Services v. Prometheus Laboratories, Inc. did not satisfy the patent eligibility requirements of 35 USC § 101, it was not surprising that the Court asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit to take a second look at Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, Inc. (the ACLU ”gene patenting”/BRCAI case). Although Myriad’s “isolated DNA” claims raise different patent eligibility issues than Prometheus’s method claims, both patents relate to technology that is applied in the medical diagnostic/therapeutic space.

It was more puzzling when the Supreme Court also asked the Federal Circuit to reconsider Ultramercial, LLC v. Hulu, LLC, where the claims at issue relate to methods of distributing copyrighted content over the internet. True, the patent eligibility of the Ultramercial claims is at issue, but how can the Supreme Court’s explication of the non-patent eligibility of natural phenomena impact the Federal Circuit’s decision that the Ultramercial methods were not disqualified from patenting as merely claiming abstract ideas?

See what I’m afraid all this could mean in my guest commentary for The Legal Pulse Blog of the Washington Legal Foundation.

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