Source: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/563/776/opinion.html
Timestamp: 2018-01-23 00:13:37
Document Index: 793687651

Matched Legal Cases: ['§202', '§202', '§210', '§210', '§202', '§202', '§210', '§210', '§210', '§202', '§202', '§202']

Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior Univ. v. Roche Molecular Systems, Inc., (Opinion by Justice Roberts) :: 563 U.S. 776 (2011) :: Justia US Supreme Court Center
Justia › US Law › US Case Law › US Supreme Court › Volume 563 › Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior Univ. v. Roche Molecular Systems, Inc. › Opinion
The Bayh-Dole Act provides that contractors may “elect to retain title to any subject invention.” §202(a). To be able to retain title, a contractor must fulfill a number of obligations imposed by the statute. The contractor must “disclose each subject invention to the [relevant] Federal agency within a reasonable time”; it must “make a written election within two years after disclosure” stating that the contractor opts to retain title to the invention; and the contractor must “file a patent application prior to any statutory bar date.” §§202(c)(1)–(3). The “Federal Government may receive title” to a subject invention if a contractor fails to comply with any of these obligations. Ibid.
Stanford asserts that the phrase “invention of the contractor” in this provision “is naturally read to include all inventions made by the contractor’s employees with the aid of federal funding.” Brief for Petitioner 32 (footnote omitted). That reading assumes that Congress subtly set aside two centuries of patent law in a statutory definition. It also renders the phrase “of the contractor” superfluous. If the phrase “of the contractor” were deleted from the definition of “subject invention,” the definition would cover “any invention … conceived or first actually reduced to practice in the performance of work under a funding agreement.” Reading “of the contractor” to mean “all inventions made by the contractor’s employees with the aid of federal funding,” as Stanford would, adds nothing that is not already in the definition, since the definition already covers inventions made under the funding agreement. That is contrary to our general “reluctan[ce] to treat statutory terms as surplusage.” Duncan v. Walker, 533 U. S. 167, 174 (2001) (internal quotation marks omitted).
Construing the phrase to refer instead to a particular category of inventions conceived or reduced to practice under a funding agreement—inventions “of the contractor,” that is, those owned by or belonging to the con- tractor—makes the phrase meaningful in the statutory definition. And “invention owned by the contractor” or “invention belonging to the contractor” are natural readings of the phrase “invention of the contractor.” As we have explained, “[t]he use of the word ‘of’ denotes ownership.” Poe v. Seaborn, 282 U. S. 101, 109 (1930); see Flores- Figueroa v. United States, 556 U. S. ___, ___, ___ (2009) (slip op., at 2, 11) (treating the phrase “identification [papers] of another person” as meaning such items belonging to another person (internal quotation marks omitted)); Ellis v. United States, 206 U. S. 246, 259 (1907) (interpreting the phrase “works of the United States” to mean “works belonging to the United States” (internal quotation marks omitted)).
Stanford’s reading of the phrase “invention of the contractor” to mean “all inventions made by the contractor’s employees” is plausible enough in the abstract; it is often the case that whatever an employee produces in the course of his employment belongs to his employer. No one would claim that an autoworker who builds a car while working in a factory owns that car. But, as noted, patent law has always been different: We have rejected the idea that mere employment is sufficient to vest title to an employee’s invention in the employer. Against this background, a contractor’s invention—an “invention of the contractor”—does not automatically include inventions made by the contractor’s employees.[Footnote 4]
The Bayh-Dole Act states that it “take[s] precedence over any other Act which would require a disposition of rights in subject inventions … that is inconsistent with” the Act. 35 U. S. C. §210(a). The United States as amicus curiae argues that this provision operates to displace the basic principle, codified in the Patent Act, that an inventor owns the rights to his invention. See Brief for United States 21. But because the Bayh-Dole Act, including §210(a), applies only to “subject inventions”—“inventions of the contractor”—it does not displace an inventor’s antecedent title to his invention. Only when an invention belongs to the contractor does the Bayh-Dole Act come into play. The Act’s disposition of rights—like much of the rest of the Bayh-Dole Act—serves to clarify the order of priority of rights between the Federal Government and a federal contractor in a federally funded invention that already belongs to the contractor. Nothing more.[Footnote 5]
The isolated provisions of the Bayh-Dole Act dealing with inventors’ rights in subject inventions are consistent with our construction of the Act. Under the Act, a federal agency may “grant requests for retention of rights by the inventor … [i]f a contractor does not elect to retain title to a subject invention.” §202(d). If an employee inventor never had title to his invention because title vested in the contractor by operation of law—as Stanford submits—it would be odd to allow the Government to grant “requests for retention of rights by the inventor.” By using the word “retention,” §202(d) assumes that the inventor had rights in the subject invention at some point, undermining the notion that the Act automatically vests title to federally funded inventions in federal contractors.[Footnote 6]
It would be noteworthy enough for Congress to supplant one of the fundamental precepts of patent law and deprive inventors of rights in their own inventions. To do so under such unusual terms would be truly surprising. We are confident that if Congress had intended such a sea change in intellectual property rights it would have said so clearly—not obliquely through an ambiguous definition of “subject invention” and an idiosyncratic use of the word “retain.” Cf. Whitman v. American Trucking Assns., Inc., 531 U. S. 457, 468 (2001) (“Congress … does not alter the fundamental details of a regulatory scheme in vague terms or ancillary provisions”).
Roche submitted a host of other claims to the District Court, including that it had “shop rights” to the patents and was entitled to a license to use the patents. See 583 F. 3d 832, 838 (CA Fed. 2009). None of those claims is now before us; we deal only with Roche’s claim to co-ownership to rebut Stanford’s standing to bring an infringement action.
Because the Federal Circuit’s interpretation of the relevant assignment agreements is not an issue on which we granted certiorari, we have no occasion to pass on the validity of the lower court’s construction of those agreements.
The dissent suggests that “we could interpret the Bayh-Dole Act as ordinarily assuming, and thereby ordinarily requiring, an assignment of patent rights by the federally funded employee to the federally funded employer.” Post, at 8. That suggestion is based in large part on Executive Order 10096, which “governs Federal Government employee-to-employer patent right assignments.” Post, at 9. Lest there be any doubt, employees of nonfederal entities that have federal funding contracts—like Holodniy—are not federal employees. And there is no equivalent executive order governing invention rights with respect to federally funded research; that issue is of course addressed by the Bayh-Dole Act.
Far from superseding the Patent Act in such a backhanded way, it is clear that §210(a)’s concern is far narrower. That provision specifies 21 different statutory provisions that the Bayh-Dole Act “take[s] precedence over,” the vast majority of which deal with the division of ownership in certain inventions between a contractor and the Government. 35 U. S. C. §§210(a)(1)–(21); see, e.g., §§210(a)(19)–(20) (the Bayh-Dole Act takes precedence over “section 6(b) of the Solar Photovoltaic Energy Research Development and Demonstration Act” and “section 12 of the Native Latex Commercialization and Economic Development Act”).
Stanford contends that it cannot be the case “that the contractor can only ‘retain title’ to an invention that it already owns, while an inventor may be considered for ‘retention’ of title only when he has assigned title away.” Reply Brief for Petitioner 8. That argument has some force. But there may be situations where an inventor, by the terms of an assignment, has subsidiary rights in an invention to which a contractor has title, as §202(d) suggests. Compare §202(d) (“retention of rights”) with §202(a) (“retain title”) (emphasis added). And at the end of the day, it is Stanford’s contention that “retain” must be “read as a synonym for ‘acquire’ or ‘receive’ ” that dooms its argument on this point. Brief for Petitioner 37.