On April 1st, Lilly filed an amicus brief in favor of Sequenom’s petition for cert. seeking to reverse Ariosa, that caused a lot of buzz in the IP community. (A copy is available at the end of this post.) To summarize, it argued that the courts’ attempts to interpret and define the judicial exceptions to s. 101 patent-eligibility was leading them to an unwarranted expansion of these policy-driven exceptions that threaten concrete technological advances that would otherwise be eligible for patent protection under the patent statute. In other words, the brief argued that the proper application the strictures of ss. 102 (requirement for physicality), 103 (inventiveness), 112(a)(WDR) and (f)(means plus function claiming) are sufficiently developed so that the court should abrogate the judicial exceptions that presently exclude what I will refer to as PAIN (phenomena of nature, abstract ideas and natural laws). (I checked that definition of “abrogate” and it does mean “do away with or to abolish by formal of official means.”)
I have written numerous posts in the last six years about the rise in importance of the written description requirement, as well as the evolution of s. 103 and I am willing to accept Lilly’s arguments. For example, the s. 102 requirement for novelty is sufficient to guard against issuance of patents on natural phenomena like fire, since fire is in the prior art. Pure concepts like blocking the NF-kB signaling pathway to treat a condition ameliorated by blocking the NF-kB pathway would fail the written description requirement. Mental steps are permissible in a claim, but the claim cannot be entirely mental steps or disembodied functional language (See 112(f)). (This brief is worth reading just for its discussion of the mental steps doctrine at pages 18-21.)
