Legal scholars from Stanford and the University of Chicago urged the Federal Circuit to rule that secret third-party sales don’t qualify as prior art when analyzing patents’ validity, challenging a broader reading of the on-sale bar from a recent district court decision.
The on-sale bar is meant to prevent inventors from extending their monopolies by commercially exploiting their own inventions before filing patent applications, the professors said in an amicus brief filed Tuesday in the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.
“Because a third-party sale of an invention does not implicate this concern, such sales, on their own, ...