Judges on a tier below a decision are bound by the higher court's ruling. This is mandatory precedent.
Judges on the same tier are not strictly bound, but in the interest of consistency (the law always seeks to be applied in the same way to the same situation), will look to the rulings of other courts on their level if no higher court has ruled. This is called persuasive precedent. The Supremes often take a case because the lower courts, (Circuit Courts of Appeals) have ruled differently on the same issue. This is called a circuit split.
Would be helpful if you cited the case, since patent law is an interesting example of a lower tier court going around the supreme court. It was pretty clear (except maybe to a lawyer) with Gottschalk v. Benson that software should not be patented, but that never stopped the federal circuit from working around that little problem... (http://www.ipwatchdog.com/2012/03/20/supreme-court-mayo-v-pr...)
I believe it was a case involving State Street Bank in the mid nineties.
This process btw is how USA effectively got software patents.
A corporation or other applied for a patent on a production process that used a computer (and therefore software) to gain more precise control of the results than previous mechanical means.
The patent holder was sued over it, and a judge ruled in the patent holders favor.
This ruling was then used by other lawyers to press for "process" patents, where the process was described in software.
And so far no higher court has overruled the initial ruling, thus effectively USA have software patents.