On November 1, 2010 the United States Supreme Court agreed to hear the Stanford University v. Roche Molecular et al. case. This case is a patent infringement lawsuit brought against Roche involving three Stanford patents for monitoring the effectiveness of HIV treatments that were developed with federal funding through the National Institutes of Health. In the course of the litigation it was discovered that one of the Stanford researchers signed a "Visitor Confidentiality Agreement" (VCA) at a company that was later acquired by Roche. The VCA purported to assign all of the Stanford researcher's patent rights in anything developed "as a consequence" of the time he spent at the company. The Federal Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that this assignment was effective to transfer the Stanford researcher's rights to Roche resulting in the dismissal of the case. The issue on which the Supreme Court granted review is whether the Federal Circuit's ruling is in violation of the Bayh-Dole Act, which regulates the ownership and transfer of patent rights in technology resulting from federal funding. The Office of the Solicitor General of the United States filed a brief with the Supreme Court supporting Stanford's position as did over 40 major research universities and several university associations such as the Association of American Universities, Association of American Medical Colleges, Association of Public Land Grant Universities, Council on Government Relations and Association of University Technology Managers. The Supreme Court issued a decision for this case on June 6, 2011.
Last modified Thu, 29 Mar, 2012 at 13:41
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