Photocopies, Patents, and Knowledge Transfer: “The Uneasy Case” of Justice Breyer’s Patentable Subject Matter Jurisprudence
ABSTRACT
One aspect of Justice Stephen Breyer’s discomfort with patents, as expressed in his opinion for the Supreme Court in Mayo v. Prometheus and his dissent from the order dismissing certiorari in LabCorp v. Metabolite, is strikingly similar to one of his critiques of copyright law in The Uneasy Case for Copyright, a well-known article he wrote as Professor Breyer more than forty-five years ago. In The Uneasy Case, Breyer argued that the burdens on duplication of technical articles imposed by copyright law restrict the flow of information and prevent scientists from enjoying spillover benefits of published research. His patent opinions on the Supreme Court, too, talk of diminished access to information resulting from intellectual property protection. In this Article, I contend that the parallel that Justice Breyer implicitly draws between the harms of copyright and patent is a questionable one. In particular, Justice Breyer’s opinions on patentable subject matter do not address the notion that inducement of disclosure and dissemination of information is one of the very purposes of patent law, nor the idea that there are many noninfringing uses of information contained in patents. I argue that these omissions may provide an insight into Justice Breyer’s patent law jurisprudence—particularly, the recent reinvigoration of limits on patentable subject matter in his opinion for the Court in Mayo.
AUTHOR
Associate Professor, George Washington University Law School.