US DOJ patent deposit stance wins narrow embrace in Corteva-Inari ruling

August 24, 2026, 21:28 GMT | Comment The US Department of Justice largely got the legal clarification it was looking for in a closely watched patent fight between Corteva Agriscience and Inari Agriculture: the public must have meaningful access to biological materials deposited as part of the patent disclosure process.

The Antitrust Division's refusal to equate that access with broader rights to transfer, propagate or commercialize deposited material allowed US Judge John Murphy of the US Eastern District of Pennsylvania to endorse the government's view without extending it as far as Inari likely hoped.

Instead, his Friday summary judgment holding (see here) drew only the first half of a boundary around biological patent deposits.

When seeds must be disclosed to repositories to satisfy Section 112 of the Patent Act, members of the public must be allowed “to learn whatever information is necessary to establish” compliance with that statutory provision — a process Murphy dubbed “reading.”

Such activity, he clarified, is “privileged.”

What remains unanswered, and highly consequential for the seed industry, is where reading ends and liability begins.

Murphy, who is sitting by designation in the District of Delaware, said that determination will depend on the technology, patent claim and particular Section 112 issue involved.

In the instant dispute, the question of whether Inari crossed the line must go to jurors at a trial scheduled to begin Sept. 23.

— ‘Fair game’ —

Corteva sued in 2023 over seeds deposited with the American Type Culture Collection (ATCC) as part of obtaining patent protection for genetically modified corn and soybean technologies.

The lawsuit alleges that Inari obtained more than 200 varieties of Corteva seeds and ultimately shipped the material abroad, where it was sequenced, propagated and genetically edited as part of an effort to develop competing products.

Inari has long maintained that much of the accused conduct was lawful because patent deposit rules require public access to biological materials to satisfy Section 112. Its position relies heavily on 37 C.F.R. § 1.808 and the Budapest Treaty governing international biological deposits.

The litigation expanded considerably in May 2025 (see here), when Murphy cleared a path for Inari to pursue unenforceability counterclaims involving 231 otherwise unasserted Corteva utility patents.

He also allowed Inari to continue developing an unclean-hands theory based on Corteva’s enforcement of utility patents covering publicly deposited seeds. Inari maintained that such actions frustrate the public’s right to the patent disclosure received in exchange for granting the patentee limited exclusivity, although Murphy stopped well short at that stage of endorsing the theory on its merits.

The question came into sharper focus earlier this year when the parties sought summary judgment.

There, Inari argued that public access authorized it to obtain, sequence and study Corteva's deposits and that federal deposit rules undermined restrictions contained in Material Transfer Agreements required by ATCC. Corteva countered that public access was never the issue. In its view, Inari used the deposits as raw material for an extensive commercial development program and sought to convert a right to inspect patented technology into a right to exploit it.

Murphy's latest ruling formalized that divide, although he stopped short of resolving where on the spectrum Inari's conduct falls.

A biological deposit, he noted, may or may not be necessary under Section 112, just as a passage in a written patent specification may or may not be necessary to provide adequate disclosure. If the deposit is necessary, however, it must be available in a manner which allows the public to learn whatever information is required to fulfill Section 112.

Although what constitutes “reading” will vary, “reading activities are privileged,” Murphy ruled.

“But other than the reading activities,” he continued, “any other acts committed by third parties are subject to background contract or patent law — fair game, so to speak.”

— DOJ's narrow victory —

That tracks the position taken by the USDOJ in May.

The Antitrust Division’s statement of interest (see here) came against the backdrop of what it presented as long-standing competition concerns in the seed market, where a handful of companies account for much of the intellectual property covering corn and soybean agricultural traits.

It warned that patent rights are an important source of market power and that extending exclusivity beyond the boundaries contemplated by the law could increase already formidable barriers to competition.

The filing nonetheless stopped short of excusing Inari's conduct and at a May 29 hearing (see here), Antitrust Division attorney Shana Wallace stressed that the USDOJ took no position on whether the accused exports, gene-editing work or commercialization activities were lawful.

Instead, she defended a narrower proposition — that the disclosure half of the patent bargain must be meaningful.

“If would-be innovators and competitors cannot have what the Federal Circuit has characterized as ‘meaningful access’ to claimed patented material, the fundamental quid pro quo at the heart of patent law remains unfulfilled,” Wallace told Murphy.

Murphy agreed that Inari has “ample authority” for a proposition that the public is entitled to perform reading activities without facing patent infringement or breach of contract liability. The defendant “even persuaded the United States to appear in this case to say the same thing,” he noted.

But the judge characterized Inari's reliance on that principle as a “critical misdirection,” because Corteva does not dispute that competitors can obtain and read its deposited samples.

The actual dispute, he said, is whether Inari's conduct constituted reading or instead violated Corteva's patent and contractual rights.

In that sense, the USDOJ largely won the principle it came to defend while providing less support for the sweeping immunity sought by Inari and other emergent companies hoping to compete with agricultural giants like Corteva, Bayer and Syngenta.

— ‘Non sequitur’ —

That could prove to be important for biological-material licensing and contracting.

Inari argued that Section 1.808 prevents patent depositors from using contracts to impose transfer and commercial-use restrictions inconsistent with the public availability required by patent law, but Murphy disagreed.

The regulation requires restrictions imposed by a depositor on the “availability to the public” of deposited material to be removed once the patent issues. But the rule “says not a word about commercial use or transfer,” the judge observed.

As a result, he found no inherent conflict between the federal deposit rule and ATCC's MTA restrictions. His conclusion should give biological patent depositors greater confidence that making material publicly available will not, on its own, sacrifice the ability to impose downstream contractual limits on transfer or commercial exploitation.

It also significantly narrows the role Murphy was willing to assign the Budapest Treaty.

Inari, he wrote, failed to persuade the court “at any point in this case” that the international agreement supplies an independent defense to either patent infringement or breach of contract.

Because Inari has consistently argued that Section 1.808 — the US Patent and Trademark Office rule governing public availability of biological patent deposits — is consistent with and implements the treaty, Murphy wrote in a footnote he could resolve the issue under the domestic regulation and treat Inari's reliance on Budapest “as non sequitur.”

— Practical reach —

That leaves a key question unanswered for patent owners, their competitors and even the USDOJ — how large is the privileged “reading” zone endorsed Friday?

Patent applicants are not universally required to make biological deposits, Murphy stressed, and even when an applicant chooses to make one the material may or may not be necessary to satisfy Section 112. That could result in greater emphasis on prosecution records and how applicants described the relationship between their deposited material and written specifications.

It also potentially creates a new fact-intensive battleground in litigation.

Under that framework, sequencing DNA may be necessary to understand one deposited invention. Growing or propagating material could conceivably be necessary to understand another.

Murphy expressly declined to impose a categorical rule, instead tying the scope of permissible activity to the technology, claim and disclosure issue at hand.

For Inari, the uncertainty has immediate consequences.

Murphy denied Corteva judgment on its breach of contract claims because a jury must decide whether Inari's conduct violated ATCC's restrictions. At the same time, he rejected Inari's separate argument that Corteva's pre-critical-date regulatory field trials rendered several utility patents invalid as prior public uses and substantially curtailed a challenge to the distinctness of Corteva's Plant Variety Protection-protected varieties.

The ruling is only one of several the judge has issued (see here) or plans to issue in response to the parties' sprawling motions for summary judgment and challenges to expert testimony. But on the question that drew the USDOJ into the case, he has now established the governing premise: meaningful public access to a biological patent deposit comes with a right to read it, not a general license to exploit it.

Next month’s trial will show how much daylight can permissibly exist between the two.

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