Fortune Tech: “Calling all law school students…this one’s for you. The U.S. Supreme Court said Monday that it would not take a case involving the right to challenge expired patents. Our story begins with inventor Timothy Pryor, who owns several sensor-related patents and founded a firm called Gesture Technology Partners in 2013. In 2021, Gesture sued tech giants Apple, Google, and LG, arguing that the trio had infringed on its patents related to the use of motion-sensing in mobile phone cameras. Apple, Google, and LG had filed petitions to invalidate the patent in 2021. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office subsequently canceled most of the patent. Gesture said the companies’ infringement occurred before the patent expired in 2020. It argued that the review of expired patents no longer implicated “public rights” as it would for active patents, rendering a U.S. PTO review moot. In January, the U.S. Court of Appeals invalidated the entire patent, ruling that public rights were still very much involved even when a patent had expired. This week, that ruling still stands. The takeaway: Patents are government-granted privileges (and not private property rights) whether they’re expired or not…”