UC Regents Join Stanford in Lawsuit Over Patent Rights

Inside Higher Ed reports on a lawsuit over patent rights to an invention of a Stanford medical researcher. The case is on appeal and will be heard by the US Supreme Court. The Regents of UC have filed a friend-of-the-court brief in support of Stanford. Stanford lost at a lower level and the case is reported to be significant for patent rights more generally of US univerities. Excerpt from the report:

In a ruling last October, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit had directed a lower court to dismiss a lawsuit Stanford had brought accusing the pharmaceutical company Roche of infringing its patents on a technology that measures the concentration of HIV in blood plasma. Stanford lost the case, essentially, because its policy on who owns inventions created using university resources required researchers, at some future date, to "agree to assign" ownership rights to the university. Meanwhile, the comparable policy at Cetus, the Roche-owned company with which the Stanford researcher, Mark Holodniy, did outside work, required the inventor to assign his rights to the company immediately. So while a federal district court backed Stanford's lawsuit challenging Roche's patents on the HIV technology, the Federal Circuit court ruled that Stanford had relinquished its rights to the patents because Holodniy had assigned ownership of his rights to Cetus/Roche.

The Inside Higher Ed full report is at http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/11/02/supreme_stanford

The brief supported by the Regents is at http://www.acenet.edu/AM/Template.cfm?Section=Site_Navigation&TEMPLATE=/CM/ContentDisplay.cfm&CONTENTID=36332

Maybe the lower court wasn't sufficiently sympathetic: