By Charlotte Schubert

A US federal appeals court ruling will make it harder for patent holders to lose their intellectual property protection because of charges—often based on small errors or omissions in patent applications—that they engaged in misconduct by misleading or deceiving the patent office. Now, except in egregious cases, such legal challenges can only succeed if the missing information would have affected whether the patent was issued in the first place.

The ruling, issued by the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, DC in late May, pivoted around a patent for the design of disposable blood glucose test strips held by the Chicago drugmaker Abbott Laboratories. Several drug companies, including a subsidiary of Germany’s Bayer, had argued that Abbott’s patent was unenforceable because contradictory information had been filed with the US and European patent offices. In 2008, a lower court agreed and overturned the patent license, but the latest ruling reverses that decision and establishes a new legal precedent.

The case could still find its way up to the US Supreme Court. Even so, the appeals court decision is “a very big deal,” says Christian Mammen, a patent attorney in private practice who also lectures at the University of California Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco.

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Image: Brian Turner, Flickr under Creative Commons