importance of protecting the incentive of

citizens and business to make new scientific

advances and create works of art. As a result

they wrote into the U.S. Constitution that

“Congress shall have power . . . To promote the

progress of science and useful arts, by securing

for limited times to authors and inventors the

exclusive right to their respective writings and

It is because of patent protection that

investors are willing to provide start-up and

investment capital for innovative ideas and

lawfully obtained intellectual property that

U.S. patent laws expressly permit. As the

pioneering company in the field, VNUS holds

broad patents that have been issued by the

U.S. patent office over all of the art cited

by AngioDynamics, Vascular Solutions, and

Diomed in patent litigation. This means that

after careful review, the U.S. patent office has

determined that the VNUS patents are not

obvious and are not anticipated by the past

work of others.

In short, VNUS is merely doing what other

medical technology companies do: lawfully

exercising its rights. If the complaint is about

the patent system, there are opportunities to

change the law. However it is worthwhile to

note that the U.S. produces a large amount

of the world’s innovative medical products,

and this is in part due to the protections for

inventors that are in place in the U.S.