Celanese: Supreme Court Passes on Petition to Clarify On-Sale Bar Post-AIA

The U.S. Supreme Court today denied a petition seeking to clarify "whether the sale of an end product made by secret use of a claimed process places the process itself on sale, rendering the process unpatentable under the AIA's on-sale provision." The petition was an appeal from the August 12,2024, precedential decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) in Celanese International Corp. v. International Trade Commission (ITC) affirming the ITC's ruling that process patents owned by Celanese were invalid due to secret sales of products made by the claimed process prior to the one-year on-sale bar, codified at 35 U.S.C. § 102(a).