What was true in 1790, the Supreme Court ruled Monday, is true still: An inventor owns his invention. Chief Justice John Roberts said that a 1980 federal statute allocating patent rights involving federally funded research did not change that basic tenet. And so Stanford University does not fully own patents that led to the development of a widely used human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) test, the court ruled in a 7-to-2 decision.
Stanford researchers had worked with a private company on a technique to measure the amount of HIV in a person’s blood, which led to a test kit marketed by Roche Molecular Systems. The case was watched closely by universities, private research and development companies and the federal government, which often jointly conduct research.
