Supreme Court Smacks Down Patent Lawyers

Scratch a patent-law expert and you'll find a Supreme Court critic. Most patent lawyers I know disdain the Supreme Court, or at least think it should butt out of their disputes and let the Federal Circuit, made up of experienced patent-law judges, do its own thing. Today in a pair of unanimous decisions reversing the Federal Circuit, the Supreme Court made it clear the contempt is mutual. It not only slapped down the specialist court, but also implied strongly that the lower court has run amok, making patent law based on its own policy preferences and not what the patent laws actually say.

Laugh if you like, but as Supreme Court emotions go, feelings seem to be running pretty high. In the first case, Limelight Networks Inc. v. Akamai Technologies Inc., the issue was whether one of Akamai's process patents for speeding up Internet downloads was violated. Limelight devised a strategy for splitting the steps of the copycat process between itself and its customers, so that no one entity or individual was copying the whole process. The Federal Circuit, protecting the patent holder, said that Limelight was infringing even if as a literal matter no one party was infringing on the whole process.