In a Sept. 21 unanimous ruling, the court denied a farmer’s right to replant seeds obtained from a grain elevator that weren’t sold under a Monsanto license agreement but contained Monsanto’s patented technology. It also tackled the concept of patent exhaustion, which is when a patent owner no longer owns the rights to a patented product because the owner has sold the item in an unrestricted sale.
In Monsanto Co. v. Bowman, the Federal Circuit upheld a September 2009 summary judgment ruling by Judge Richard Young of the Southern District of Indiana. That ruling found that Vernon Hugh Bowman infringed two patents owned by Monsanto, an agricultural biotechnology company, for genetically altered soybean seeds. Young awarded Monsanto $84,456.20.
