Amgen's anemia franchise, which brought in $6.6 billion in sales last year, has been under siege due to safety concerns and a pullback in coverage by the U.S. agency that oversees Medicare and Medicaid.

Tuesday's ruling was good news for Amgen, but Roche said there was still a long way to go in their dispute.

"While we disagree with the Judge on the matter of infringement, the ruling does not determine the ultimate validity of any Amgen patents," Roche said.

If approved, Roche's Mircera would compete with Amgen's blockbusters Epogen and Aranesp and Johnson & Johnson's (JNJ.N: Quote, Profile, Research) Procrit.

The drugs belong to a class known as erythropoiesis-stimulating agents, which are used to boost red blood cells in anemia patients to help avoid the need for blood transfusions.

Thousand Oaks, California-based Amgen has been fighting the Roche drug on several legal and regulatory fronts, alleging it infringes Amgen patents.

Roche has argued its drug is different, claiming Mircera is longer lasting than other available anemia drugs.

Kilpatrick Stockton LLP said a Georgia court ruled PepsiCo Inc.'s (PEP) "bag- in-box" technology doesn't infringe on a Coca-Cola Co. (KO) patent.

The suit was over a type of container Purchase, N.Y., PepsiCo had been using to distribute and dispense fountain syrup, which Atlanta-based Coca-Cola said infringed on its patent.

The law firm representing PepsiCo said the action had been pending in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia for about two years. The firm moved for summary judgment, arguing that the judge's interpretation of the patent in a prior case precluded a finding of infringement in this case.

The judge, Richard W. Story, granted the motion and dismissed the case.

Coca-Cola wasn't immediately available for comment.

Peer-to-Patent, an initiative of New York Law School's Institute for Information Law and Policy in cooperation with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), began on Friday of last week.

In an Official Gazette Notice published on June 6, 2007 (www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/dapp/opla/preognotice/peerreviewpilot.pdf), the USPTO announced that this pilot program to test the value of public participation in the patent examination process will run for one year. The USPTO has committed to provide feedback on the usefulness of public submissions. The results of the pilot will be compiled by the USPTO and New York Law School.

CA, GE, HP, IBM, Intel, International Characters, Intellectual Ventures, Microsoft, Oracle, Out of the Box Computing, Red Hat, Sun Microsystems, and Yahoo! have requested to participate in the pilot. As of Friday, June 15, five applications (from HP, IBM, Intel, and Red Hat) were made available for public review on the Peer-to-Patent Web site at www.peertopatent.org, and the public has already begun to review and comment. Descriptions of the applications are available at http://dotank.nyls.edu/communitypatent/applications.html.

Special note: Peer-to-Patent Organizers and Steering Committee members will present the project and answer questions at the Peer-to-Patent auditorium on New York Law School's Democracy Island, Second Life on Monday, June 18 at 12 p.m. PST/3 p.m. EST. Attendees can find the event by searching Second Life's directory for Democracy Island, or by following this link: www.tiny.cc/rfqh3.

Patent applicants with computer software patent applications to be published during the coming year may apply to join the pilot by completing the form available from the USPTO at www.uspto.gov/web/patents/peerpriorartpilot/submission.pdf. Applications accepted to the pilot will be advanced out of turn and reviewed at no charge within one year, instead of the average four-year waiting period. Applicants can also request early publication without payment of an early publication fee.

The Peer-to-Patent Web site enables the public to find information to help the USPTO evaluate the patent application. The custom-designed Web site facilitates: review and discussion of posted patent applications sharing of research to locate references to relevant earlier publications submission of these prior art references with an explanation of relevance annotating and evaluating submitted prior art winnowing of top ten prior art references, which, together with commentary, will be forwarded to the USPTO patent education to inform public participation forwarding of public submissions directly to the USPTO for consideration. Reviewing patent applications is free and open to all via the Peer-to-Patent Web site at www.peertopatent.org.

"We are very encouraged by the Supreme Court's decision," Jeffrey Citron, chairman of Holmdel, New Jersey-based Vonage, said in a statement. The ruling "should have positive implications for Vonage and our pending patent litigation with Verizon," he said.

The high court devised a new test for determining when an invention is too obvious to warrant patent protection. The ruling makes it harder for those applying for patents, as well as patent holders seeking to win infringement lawsuits, to show they have developed a genuine innovation.

"There is no merit" to the Vonage request, John Thorne, New York-based Verizon's deputy general counsel, said in a telephone interview. "It's a delaying tactic to avoid final resolution of the appeal."

Yesterday's Supreme Court ruling concerning patent validity overturned a decades-old test used by the Federal Circuit. The case centered on the requirement that an invention be "non- obvious" and not simply combine prior inventions.

Vonage was ordered by U.S. District Judge Claude Hilton in Alexandria, Virginia, to stop adding customers after losing the patent ruling. On April 24, the company won its request in the appeals court to continue business as usual while it appeals.

The appeals court, which specializes in patent law, has set a June 25 hearing to consider Vonage's bid to reverse the jury verdict.

In a response filed in federal court in New York late Monday, Google said that YouTube respects the importance of copyrights and goes above and beyond what is required under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which gives Web hosts protection from copyright lawsuits so long as they comply with requests to remove unauthorized material.

YouTube says its cooperates with holders of copyrights and immediately complies with requests to have unauthorized material removed from the site.

The decision extends a Supreme Court trend that has put new limits on patent rights. In today's case, the justices heeded arguments from large computer companies and automakers that the lower court test, which centered on the requirement that an invention be "non-obvious,'' had given too much power to developers of trivial technological improvements.

"Granting patent protection to advances that would occur in the ordinary course without real innovation retards progress,'' Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the court.

In a second ruling today, the court gave software makers new protections from patent lawsuits on exports, ruling that Microsoft Corp. doesn't owe damages to AT&T Inc. for copies of the Windows operating system installed on computers overseas.

The gas-pedal case concerned claims that a patent was invalid because it simply combined prior inventions. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit had required challengers to show a "teaching, suggestion or motivation'' -- typically in writing -- to put the earlier inventions together.

Companies that are frequent targets of patent-infringement claims urged the Supreme Court to overturn the Federal Circuit test. The group included Intel, Cisco, Microsoft, Time Warner Inc., Viacom Inc., Micron Technology Inc. and automakers General Motors Corp., Ford Motor Co. and DaimlerChrysler AG.

Other companies, more concerned about protecting their own patents, took the opposite side in the case. General Electric Co., 3M Co., Procter & Gamble Co., DuPont Co., Johnson & Johnson and trade groups for the brand-name drug and biotech industries signed briefs backing Teleflex in the case.

The disputed Teleflex patent covers an electronic sensor combined with gas, brake or clutch pedals that adjust to the height of the driver. Teleflex says its method took less space than previous combinations.

KSR, based in Ridgetown, Ontario, makes adjustable pedals for GM's Chevrolet and GMC trucks and sport-utility vehicles.

A federal judge in Detroit ruled the technology was too obvious to qualify for a patent. The Federal Circuit in Washington revived the suit, ordering the judge to reconsider whether the patent was valid.

Teleflex argued that the Federal Circuit standard avoided the problem of "perfect hindsight'' by requiring proof that an innovation was obvious at the time it was created.

Teleflex, based in Limerick, Pennsylvania, sold its auto- pedal business in August 2005 to DriveSol Worldwide, an affiliate of Sun Capital Partners Inc., a private investment firm based in Boca Raton, Florida. Sun Capital has taken over the case.