Supreme Court hits the gas in pedal case

On 28 November, the US Supreme Court opened proceedings in KSR International v Teleflex – a case that could rewrite the guidelines on technical obviousness, with potential repercussions for the entire US patent system. Teleflex is advocating a standard in US IP law that requires challengers to produce hard evidence of prior art reliance in order to overturn patents. This standard – which helped the firm to obtain a patent for an automobile gas pedal design – makes it hard to invalidate a patent on claims of obviousness alone.

In 2002, Teleflex sued rival manufacturer, KSR, for infringement. KSR had blended what it had considered obvious prior developments in order to make its own pedal system for General Motors. The Supreme Court’s involvement was prompted by divergent court rulings: while the lower court found for KSR, the Court of Appeal favoured Teleflex.

KSR has received backing from some of the world’s biggest technology firms, including Microsoft and Cisco, who have pooled their interest in the case into a Friend of the Court brief to the Supreme Justices, arguing for the invalidation of Teleflex’s patent. ‘The proliferation of large numbers of obvious patents,’ states the brief, ‘has increased greatly the potential for inadvertent infringement.’

Jim DeLong, of US free-market think tank, The Progress and Freedom Foundation (PFF), wrote a further brief to the Supreme Court, asking it to consider the case. He commented: ‘Too loose a standard discourages innovation by denying rewards to inventors, but too lax a standard triggers a gold rush after every significant advance, to improve on it in some trivial yet patentable way … Immense transaction costs are imposed on the economy as businesses try to negotiate their way out of patent thickets.’