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Well no ... That's Newman's point. It's not the rule of law. | 96 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
Well no ... That's Newman's point. It's not the rule of law.
Authored by: tknarr on Sunday, May 20 2012 @ 10:17 PM EDT

Here's the thing, though: the courts don't make the law, nor do they implement the law. If Congress has written the law acceptably, and the agency is following that law, the courts are not supposed to go overruling the agency. The courts haven't found the patent laws Congress wrote to be unConstitutional, they haven't found the USPTO to have failed to follow those laws in determining that the patent is invalid and they haven't found that the USPTO lacks the legal authority to rule on patent validity, so by exactly what authority do the courts get to tell the USPTO that it can't find those patents to be invalid?

The problem is that the courts don't want to accept what Congress has written into law: that the initial grant of a patent is not the last word on it's validity. The courts can't find a way to say "Congress can't write that into law.", but they keep trying to ignore it anyway. Which leads to situations where the courts make a ruling they have no authority to make before the agency which does have the authority has had it's final say in the matter. If the courts have a problem with the results, let them stay the matter until the USPTO has finished following the process Congress wrote into law.

That's not to say the courts can't make a ruling. They can find that the USPTO failed to follow the law when it declared a patent valid, and invalidate the patent. They can rule that one or more of the USPTO's findings in denying a patent failed to comply with patent law, but that would only be appropriate when the patent applicant was making a claim against the USPTO itself rather than against an alleged infringer. The infringer simply isn't the proper party to answer a claim that the USPTO failed to comply with the requirements of the law. And without a claim that the USPTO failed to follow the law... well, Congress delegated implementation of patent law to the USPTO, not the courts.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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