Taking on a high-stakes patent dispute, the Supreme Court last week appeared to be searching for a way to soften the impact of a lower court ruling that critics say has sharply limited protection for more than one million patents.
The court heard arguments in Festo Corp. v. Shoketsu Kinzoku Kogyo Kabushiki Co., a dispute over conflicting patents for “rodless cylinder assemblies,” described by many patent lawyers as the most important patent case in decades. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, in a November 2000 ruling, said that the traditional protection enjoyed by patent holders against near-copycat competitors-known as the doctrine of equivalents-is stripped away if the patent claim was narrowed during the application process.
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