Claim: U.S. Supreme Court tosses out Medtronic pacemaker patent loss.
Verdict: SUPPORTS

Retrieved passages:
title: Medtronic, Inc. v. Mirowski Family Ventures, LLC
text: two of its patents, which dealt with cardiac resynchronization therapy, a pacemaker that is used to treat congestive heart failure. Medtronic thought that its products did not infringe Mirowski's patents, either because the products fell outside the scope of the patent claims or because the patents were invalid. Medtronic brought an action for declaratory judgment in the United States District Court for the District of Delaware, seeking a declaration that its products did not infringe Mirowski's patents and that the patents were invalid. The District Court recognized that Mirowski was the defendant in the action, but it held that Mirowski,

title: Medtronic, Inc. v. Mirowski Family Ventures, LLC
text: "[a]s the part[y] asserting infringement," bore the burden of proving infringement. After a bench trial, the court found that Mirowski had not proved infringement, either directly or under the doctrine of equivalents, and it therefore lost. On appeal, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit held that "when an infringement counterclaim by a patentee is foreclosed by the continued existence of a license, a licensee seeking a declaratory judgment of noninfringement and of no consequent liability under the license bears the burden of persuasion." Therefore, Medtronic, as plaintiff, bore the burden of proof, and the District Court

title: Medtronic, Inc. v. Mirowski Family Ventures, LLC
text: ruling was vacated and remanded. Because of the importance of burdens of proof in patent litigation, the Supreme Court granted certiorari to hear the appeal. In a unanimous ruling, the Court reversed the Federal Circuit ruling. Justice Breyer held that, when a licensee seeks a declaratory judgment against a patentee to establish that there is no infringement, the burden of proving infringement remains with the patentee. He stated that "Simple legal logic, resting upon settled case law, strongly supports our conclusion." The case law in question has held that: Breyer also noted that "practical considerations lead to the same conclusion":

title: Medtronic, Inc. v. Mirowski Family Ventures, LLC
text: Medtronic, Inc. v. Mirowski Family Ventures, LLC Medtronic, Inc. v. Mirowski Family Ventures, LLC, 571 U.S. ___ (2014), is a case of the Supreme Court of the United States that deals with civil procedure, and specifically with the question of the burden of proof required in pursuing declaratory judgments. In 1991, Medtronic and Mirowski entered into an agreement permitting Medtronic to practice certain Mirowski patents in exchange for royalty payments. In 2007, the parties found themselves in the midst of an "infringement" dispute, and Mirowski gave Medtronic notice that it believed seven new Medtronic products violated various claims contained in

title: Mallinckrodt, Inc. v. Medipart, Inc.
text: Mallinckrodt, Inc. v. Medipart, Inc. Mallinckrodt, Inc. v. Medipart, Inc., 976 F.2d 700 (Fed. Cir. 1992), is a decision of the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, in which the court appeared to overrule or drastically limit many years of U.S. Supreme Court precedent affirming the patent exhaustion doctrine, for example in "Bauer & Cie. v. O'Donnell". According to the opinions in the case, the plaintiff Mallinckrodt owned a patent on a device for dispensing a radioactive mist used in taking diagnostic lung X-rays, and for trapping the mist after use. Mallinckrodt sold the device to hospitals

title: Tri-Ergon
text: film companies which used the Tri-Ergon design - for infringement, specifically the flywheel on the sound drum. During a series of legal tussles Fox at first won his lawsuit on appeal and then lost it after an unusual reversal of decision by the U. S. Supreme Court in October 1934 not to review the case. The Supreme Court surprisingly relented, heard the appeal and finally ruled in March 1935 that neither system was 'new', and that there were prior inventions. An appeal by Alttona Publix was rejected on 1 April 1935. Although this brought a swift end to the sound

title: United States v. General Electric Co.
text: manufacturer licensing competitive manufacturers. It does not apply to a price-fix on an unpatented product made by a patented machine or patented method. The United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has continued to rely on what is termed, above, the core of the opinion. In "Mallinckrodt, Inc. v. Medipart, Inc.", the Federal Circuit relied on "GE" as the basis for its ruling that the patentee’s post-sale restrictions were not prohibited under the exhaustion doctrine. The Federal Circuit’s "Quanta" decision relied for its rationale on "Mallinckrodt", and thus on "GE". But the Supreme Court’s reversal of that decision

title: Public Citizen Litigation Group
text: or competing products infringes the company's intellectual property rights. Since the Litigation Group was founded in 1972, its lawyers have argued 63 cases before the United States Supreme Court—including four cases during the Court’s 2005-2006 term and four in the 2007-2008 term. The Litigation Group’s cases include: • "Richlin Security Service Co. v. Chertoff" (2008), in which the Court held that a prevailing party be awarded attorney fees for paralegal services at the market rate for such services. • "Riegel v. Medtronic" (2008), in which the Court held that the express preemption provision of the Medical Device Amendments to the

title: Artificial cardiac pacemaker
text: of The Heart Rhythm Society, a specialist organization based in Washington, DC found that it was legal and ethical to honor requests by patients, or by those with legal authority to make decisions for patients, to deactivate implanted cardiac devices. Lawyers say that the legal situation is similar to removing a feeding tube, though there is currently no legal precedent involving pacemakers in the United States of America. A patient in the United States is thought to have a right to refuse or discontinue treatment, including a pacemaker that keeps him or her alive. Physicians have a right to refuse

title: Continuing patent application
text: software companies, electronics companies and US government agencies for the reasons given above. Those that favored the rule changes felt that said changes were consistent with the laws governing continuation practice. On August 22, 2007, inventor Dr. Triantafyllos Tafas sued the USPTO in the United States District Court of the Eastern District of Virginia on the ground that the rule changes were in violation of the U.S. patent law and therefore are invalid. On October 9, 2007, pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline filed a similar suit seeking a preliminary injunction to prevent the enforcement of the new rules. The court consolidated the

title: Henry v. A.B. Dick Co.
text: not within the exhaustion doctrine was revived in the Federal Circuit in "Mallinckrodt, Inc. v. Medipart, Inc." That case apparently was overruled "sub silentio" in "Quanta Computer, Inc. v. LG Electronics, Inc." However, an "en banc" decision of the Federal Circuit refused to overrule "Mallinckrodt" and instead reaffirmed it. A certiorari petition is now pending in that case. In 1917, when the "Motion Picture Patents" case overruled "A.B., Dick" and the "Button-Fastener" case, a commentator remarked: It by no means follows that because a patentee may withhold the use of the patented article entirely he may license its use with

title: Mallinckrodt, Inc. v. Medipart, Inc.
text: this court overrule "Mallinckrodt, Inc. v. Medipart, Inc.", 976 F.2d 700 (Fed. Cir. 1992), to the extent it ruled that a sale of a patented article, when the sale is made under a restriction that is otherwise lawful and within the scope of the patent grant, does not give rise to patent exhaustion? The Federal Circuit then re-affirmed "Mallinckrodt" but on December 2, 2016, the Supreme Court granted "certiorari". The case was argued in 2017 and was decided in June 2017; the Supreme Court emphatically rejected enforcement of post-sale patent rights, thereby disapproving the decision in "Mallinckrodt". Mallinckrodt, Inc. v.

title: Mayo Collaborative Services v. Prometheus Laboratories, Inc.
text: and while the claims at issue in this particular case are unfortunately lost, the Federal Circuit will work to moderate (and eventually overturn) this embarrassing display by the Supreme Court. This will eventually be accomplished the same as it was after the Supreme Court definitively ruled software is not patentable in "Gottschalk v. Benson", and the same as the ruling in "KSR v. Teleflex" will be overruled. . . . [T]here is still a lot of work left to be done by the Federal Circuit to finally overrule the Supreme Court's "KSR" decision. It took almost 10 years to overrule

title: Mayo Collaborative Services v. Prometheus Laboratories, Inc.
text: been taken out behind the woodshed and summarily executed by the Supreme Court this morning. An enormous number of patents will now have no enforceable claims. Hundreds of billions of dollars in corporate value has been erased. Quinn then called for the Federal Circuit to overrule "Mayo", as he asserted it had done with other erroneous precedents and predicted that it would do so with "Mayo": How long will it take the Federal Circuit to overrule this inexplicable nonsense? . . . Those well acquainted with the industry know that the Supreme Court is not the final word on patentability,

title: Patentable subject matter
text: software. In May 2013, the Federal Circuit handed down an en banc decision in CLS Bank v. Alice applying the various concepts in the "Supreme Court Trilogy". The claims at issue were found unpatentable by a narrow margin, but the differences in positions of the various judges on the panel were dramatic and not definitive. On March 20, 2012, the United States Supreme Court ruled in "Mayo Collaborative Services v. Prometheus Laboratories, Inc." that a process patent, which Prometheus Laboratories had obtained for correlations between blood test results and patient health in determining an appropriate dosage of a specific medication

title: Medtronic
text: metronome and created the first battery-powered external artificial pacemaker. The company expanded through the 1950s, selling equipment built by other companies but also developing custom-made devices. Bakken built a small pacemaker that could be strapped to the body and powered by batteries. Work in the new field later produced an implantable pacemaker in 1960. The company built headquarters in the Minneapolis suburb of St. Anthony, Minnesota, in 1960 and the company moved to Fridley in the 1970s. Medtronic's main competitors in the cardiac rhythm field include Boston Scientific and St. Jude Medical. In 1998, Medtronic acquired Physio-Control for $538 million.

title: Mallinckrodt, Inc. v. Medipart, Inc.
text: 2007, the United States Solicitor General filed an "amicus curiae" brief in "Quanta Computer, Inc. v. LG Electronics, Inc.", stating, as to the first prong, "The test adopted by the Federal Circuit in "Mallinckrodt" thus reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the role and scope of the patent-exhaustion doctrine. ... The court of appeals' approach cannot be reconciled with those [Supreme Court] precedents," and more generally that the Federal Circuit's "Quanta" opinion based on "Mallinckrodt" "rests on the same erroneous understanding of patent exhaustion that infuses the Federal Circuit's approach to this area of the law." The effect of "Mallinckrodt" may

title: Akamai Techs., Inc. v. Limelight Networks, Inc.
text: products, who provided the necessary instructions, would result in the defendants' induced infringement of the physician, under § 271(b). In "Medgraph, Inc. v. Medtronic, Inc." the Federal Circuit upheld a district court ruling that the new "Akamai" standard did not aid the patentee Medgraph in its suit because there was no "showing that Medtronic itself directly infringed the method claims or that it acted as a ‘mastermind’ by controlling or directing anyone else’s direct infringement." Medgraph argued that it should prevail under the Federal Circuit's 2015 ruling that infringement could be found "when an alleged infringer conditions participation in an

title: Stanford University v. Roche Molecular Systems, Inc.
text: The decision was "largely moot" as the majority, led by Chief Justice Roberts, held that U.S. patent rights have always (since 1790) initially vested in "the inventor" and that the non-specific language of the Bayh-Dole Act does nothing to change the original setup. The effects on patent law were negligible: "The Supreme Court’s grant of certiorari for this case came as a surprise to many intellectual property attorneys who did not believe that the Bayh-Dole Act changed the centuries old proposition that inventors ultimately have rights in their patents. As a result, the Supreme Court’s decision certainly reassured inventors, as

title: Quanta Computer, Inc. v. LG Electronics, Inc.
text: Computer, Inc. v. LG Electronics, Inc.", 553 U.S. 617 (2008), should this court overrule "Mallinckrodt, Inc. v. Medipart, Inc.", 976 F.2d 700 (Fed. Cir. 1992), to the extent it ruled that a sale of a patented article, when the sale is made under a restriction that is otherwise lawful and within the scope of the patent grant, does not give rise to patent exhaustion? Quanta Computer, Inc. v. LG Electronics, Inc. Quanta Computer, Inc. v. LG Electronics, Inc., 553 U.S. 617 (2008), is a decision of the United States Supreme Court in which the Court reaffirmed the validity of the