“Under the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act of 2011 (‘AIA’), ‘[a] person shall be entitled to a patent unless * * * the claimed invention was patented, described in a printed publication, or in public use, on sale, or otherwise available to the public before the effective filing date of the claimed invention.’ 35 U.S.C. § 102(a). The AIA defines the ‘claimed invention’ as ‘the subject matter defined by a claim in a patent or an application for a patent.’ 35 U.S.C. § 100(j). For process claims, the subject matter defined by the claim is the process itself, not an end product made using the process.”
“The question presented is:”
“Whether the sale of an end product made by secret use of a later-patented process places ‘the claimed invention’—that is, the process itself—on sale and thus invalidates the patent on that process, even where the claimed process was not disclosed by the sale and cannot be discovered by studying the end product.”
