Supreme Court Patent Challenges February 2025
Patent – Patently-O 2025-02-17
Summary:
by Dennis Crouch
The Supreme Court's 2024-2025 patent docket has a growing number of cases awaiting consideration. I count fifteen pending cases that could reshape multiple facets of patent law. At the heart of this term lies a set of challenges to the Federal Circuit's Rule 36 summary affirmance practice, with five separate petitions (ParkerVision, Island IP, ATOS, Audio Evolution Diagnostics and Converter Manufacturing) arguing that the court's frequent use of one-word affirmances undermines transparency and violates statutory requirements for reasoned decision-making and demands supervision from the Supreme Court. This procedural theme extends beyond Rule 36 to encompass broader questions about how patent cases should be adjudicated, with three petitions (BBiTV, Island IP, and Brumfield) challenging the Federal Circuit's approach to resolving factual disputes at summary judgment, particularly in patent eligibility cases. Impact Engine and Audio Evolution Diagnostics also challenge the eligibility framework, with Audio Evolution specifically questioning whether medical diagnostic machine patents should be considered abstract ideas under Alice/Mayo.
Two cases raise what I see as core substantive patent law issues outside of eligibility:
- Converter Manufacturing questions the court's long-standing approach to prior art enablement.
- Celanese raises questions the the scope of the on-sale bar under the America Invents Act, particularly for secret processes.