Supreme Court Case Pits Inventors Against Their Former Employers

The U.S. Supreme Court will consider how to balance the rights of companies to protect patent rights created with their resources against the ability of inventors to move freely between employers in a case to be argued Wednesday.

The high court is reviewing a U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit decision holding that the inventor of a surgical device and his current company, Minerva Surgical Inc., can’t argue two patents on the device are invalid to defeat infringement claims by his former employer Hologic Inc., which now owns the rights to the inventions.

The appeals court applied ...