The truth is, Stevens may be only slightly more “patent-skeptical” than the current Supreme Court as a whole. Decisions like the unanimous 2006 eBay v. MercExchange indicate that when it comes to patent law, the court may not actually be divided at all. Instead, the Court is defining itself in this area as being in opposition to the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.
More than any other current justice, Stevens has seen both patent and copyright law as balancing acts that need to be kept in check by the Supreme Court. Along with Justice Breyer, Stevens dissented in the Eldred v. Ashcroft case, arguing that Congress shouldn’t be allowed to retroactively extend existing copyright grants, as they did by passing the 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act.
In fact, Stevens made his most profound impact on intellectual property law in the copyright sphere by authoring the majority opinion in the 1984 case Sony Corp. v. Universal City Studios, also known as the Betamax decision, which some consider the most important copyright ruling of all time.
