Posts Tagged: "government franchise"

The Supreme Crusade to Weaken Patent Rights in America

Over the years the Supreme Court has reached many controversial decisions, but in the patent space they have made statements that demonstrate just how incompetent they are to render decisions in this vitally important area to our national economy. While the Supreme Court has ruled that a pH of 5 is equivalent to a pH of 6, that is simply false; pH is logarithmic. The Supreme Court has also ruled that manganese is equivalent to magnesium, which is also not true. The Supreme Court has ruled that isolated DNA exists in nature, which it doesn’t. But with each new, ridiculous decision that proves they are out of their depth we just live with the consequences as if what they say is visionary.

The Supreme Court is wrong, a patent is not a franchise

The word franchise is defined as an authorization granted by a government or company to an individual or group enabling them to carry out specified commercial activities… A patent is an exclusive right by nature. A patent does not give anyone the right to do anything other than to exclude someone else from doing something… So how then can a patent be a grant from the government to carry out specified commercial activities? That is simply not what a patent is, it is not what the statute says, it is not the grant provided to the patentee. To put it point blank, the Supreme Court has fundamentally altered the nature of the patent grant without reason or authority.

IP rights are essential ingredients to our innovation system

“Let’s talk a bit about intellectual property rights,” Undersecretary of Commerce and Director of NIST Walter Copan said at the LES Silicon Valley conference on Wednesday, April 25, 2018. “IP rights are American property rights.” This simple, declarative statement by Director Copan was as important as it was direct. These words were spoken on the morning after the United States Supreme Court issued its decision in Oil States v. Greene’s Energy, which rather than saying patents are a property right instead called patents merely a “government franchise.”