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stiffel

Sears, Roebuck & Co. v. Stiffel Co., 376 U.S. 225 (1964), was a United States Supreme Court case which limited state law on unfair competition when it prevents the copying of an item that is not covered by a patent.Justice Hugo Black wrote for a unanimous Court that the Constitution reserved power over intellectual property such as patents to the federal government exclusively. Since the trial court had found Stiffel's patent invalid as insufficiently inventive, its product design was thus in the public domain and no state law could be used to prevent Sears from copying it. The Supreme Court made a similar ruling in a companion case decided the same day, Compco Corp. v. Day-Brite Lighting, Inc..These two cases were the first decisions of the Supreme Court that states could not, because of the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution, create their own patent or patent-like laws. The issue had been raised, but not decided, in Gibbons v. Ogden, in which Attorney General Wirt argued on behalf of the United States for federal patent preemption of New York's grant of a steamboat patent to Robert Fulton.

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