Supreme Court Grants Cert to Decide the State of Mind Necessary for Induced Infringement
As we posted here, the Federal Circuit held in February that an accused infringer need not have actual knowledge of a patent to be liable for inducement of infringement. SEB S.A. v. Montgomery Ward & Co., Inc., 594 F.3d 1360 (Fed. Cir. 2010). That decision conflicted with the Federal Circuit’s en banc holding a little over three years earlier in DSU Medical Corp. v. JMS Co., Ltd., 471 F.3d 1293 (Fed. Cir. 2006), that “[t]he requirement that the alleged infringer knew or should have known his actions would induce actual infringement necessarily includes the requirement that he or she knew of the patent.” The SEB panel danced around the DSU decision by stating that DSU did not set out the “metes and bounds” of the knowledge-of-the-patent requirement.
This morning, the Supreme Court granted a petition for certiorari filed by two of the defendants in SEB to decide “Whether the legal standard for the ‘state of mind’ element of a claim for actively inducing infringement under 35 U.S.C. 271(b) is ‘deliberate indifference of a known risk’ that an infringement may occur or instead ‘purposeful, culpable expression and conduct’ to encourage an infringement.” Global-Tech Appliances, Inc. v. SEB S.A., cert. granted, Docket No. 10-6 (U.S. Oct. 12, 2010).
The cert. petition can be found here, the opposition brief can be found here, and an amicus brief in support of granting cert. filed by 26 Law, Economics and Business Professors can be found here.
