The twisting, turning saga of Illumina and Ariosa Diagnostics has taken another detour.

On Monday the U.S. Supreme Court referred an issue from the six-year-old dispute over fetal diagnostics to the Solicitor General’s Office for its views, raising the likelihood that it may wind up on the high court’s docket next year.

…

Ariosa has amicus curiae support from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, R Street Institute and a group of law professors led by Stanford’s Phillip Malone. “The federal circuit has departed from the fundamental principle of the patent system: an invention must be new to be patentable,” EFF senior staff attorney Daniel Nazer wrote for EFF and R Street.