Injunctions + Balance = Innovation
Congress is considering changing the law to create automatic injunctions. Help preserve American law and innovation, and our freedoms as businesses and consumers to fair practices in the technology market place.
The U.S. Supreme Court confirmed the American rule that patent injunctions are not automatic in 2006 in the eBay case. We inherited our country’s equitable legal approach to patent remedies from the 18thCentury English courts, and it has been used in the U.S. since the days of Franklin and Jefferson, and later Edison and Einstein.
The “automatic” approach to injunctions is foreign, and used only in a few countries that have never had the benefit of American common law courts. Injunctions prohibit a defendant from making or selling a product that has been found to infringe a patent. Automatic injunctions are mandatory court-ordered exclusion from the market. They shut businesses down and prevent them from operating in the US market, regardless of whether an American judge thinks that is the right thing to do to serve the interests of justice.
The better and fairer approach is to maintain America’s centuries-old approach, using injunctions only when necessary to achieve justice. As in other areas of law, patent judges should be entitled to use monetary remedies and damages to compensate patent owners for their inventions while allowing innovative companies to stay in the market for the good of the economy and of consumers.
What is an Injunction?
In the patent law context, an injunction is a court order that puts someone out of business. Whether it is a small business or a large multinational corporation, an injunction means the company is excluded from the market.
Does U.S. law currently allow for injunctions?
Injunctions are disfavored in American law because they involve an extreme form of government intervention in the market. An injunction can also put an entire business at risk.
What are automatic injunctions?
Automatic injunctions mean that every time a patent is infringed, no matter the situation and no matter whether money damages would be sufficient to compensate the patent owner, the defendant can be put out of business. If the U.S. adopted this approach, U.S. courts would lose the “equitable discretion” they have always had to order money payments instead of an injunction. In other words, no matter how unfair it would be to put a company out of business, the court would have no choice but to do so.
