Netscape Communications Corp. v. Konrad
2002 American ruling on distinct entities
Netscape Communications Corp. v. Konrad, 295 F.3d 1315 (Fed. Cir. 2002), was a decision of the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. It affirmed that public use or commercialization of an invention more than one year before the filing date will cost the inventor his patent rights (see also 35 U.S.C. § 100-105). The inventor in this case was Allan M. Konrad, a Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory employee who devised and implemented a method for accessing and searching data objects stored on a remote computer (U.S. patents 5,544,320; 5,696,901; 5,974,444). Netscape moved to invalidate Konrad's patents in U.S. district court immediately after Konrad filed a patent infringement suit against Netscape customers. The district court concluded that Konrad's patents were invalid because they did not meet the public-use and on-sale bar eligibility criteria of 35 U.S.C. § 102b.
In particular, the district court found that Konrad (1) placed his invention in the public domain by demonstrating it to others without a confidentiality agreement and (2) tried to sell it to other legal entities, both more than one year before he filed for the patent.
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