Big pharma supports Apple health sensor en banc bid
Apple has secured the backing of a major pharmaceutical industry trade association, as it seeks to persuade the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit to revisit a case centring on a pair of health sensor patents.
The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), which represents leading pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, filed the amicus curiae in support of Apple on Thursday, October 14.
On the same day, university boards from Michigan, Iowa, Nebraska and Illinois, filed another supporting amicus curiae, in collaboration with the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation and the Purdue Research Foundation.
The patent row emerged when tech company Omni held that the Apple Watch infringed its US patent numbers 9,651,533 and 9,861,286 and lodged a complaint in the Eastern District of Texas.
Apple filed a motion to dismiss the suit, holding that Omni lacked standing to file the infringement claims, because the cited inventor, Mohammed Islam, assigned his patent rights to the University of Michigan when he began working there.
But in a split 2-1 decision, Judges Richard Linn and Edward Chen, affirmed the district court's verdict in favour of Omni, agreeing that Islam’s employment agreement did not clearly stipulate the transfer of patent rights.
In her dissent, Judge Pauline Newman faulted the majority ruling, finding that it incorrectly interpreted the employment contract and overturned long-standing practice.
In its filing, PhRMA stated that: “The protections of patent law provide incentives for companies like PhRMA’s members to take on the huge risks and astronomical costs of drug development. For those incentives to work effectively, biopharmaceutical innovation requires stability and predictability in patent law.”
The association further argued that the panel’s decision “retroactively and instantaneously changed the ownership of patents” across the country, dashing the reliance interests of PhRMA’s members and producing “significant uncertainty” about where the law of patent assignment will go next.
“The panel’s decision merits en banc review because, at a minimum, it raises a question of exceptional importance regarding the test for ownership of various patents across the US—even in situations when ownership previously had been undisputed,” said the amicus curiae.
The association also contended that the panel majority’s ruling narrowed the scope of language that can be used to automatically assign patent rights, imposing a new and rigid “magic words” requirement.
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