Justices Urged to Eye Ruling That ‘Upends’ Patent Evidence Test

A Federal Circuit ruling making it harder for companies to argue their patents don’t cover obvious inventions “has far-reaching implications across the entire patent landscape,” a bike part maker told the U.S. Supreme Court in asking it to review the decision.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit rewrote the standard used for evaluating secondary considerations, such as the commercial success or praise of a product, SRAM LLC argued in its petition for review. The court’s December ruling revived Fox Factory Inc.'s patent office challenge to SRAM’s U.S. Patent No. 9,182,027 on a novel chainring that keeps the ...