Posts in IPWatchdog Articles

Welcome back to Cool AI Patents of the Month, where we highlight innovations that blur the line between science fiction and real-world engineering. Last month, we looked at AI-generated voice replicas, particularly in sports broadcasting. That concept is no longer theoretical. Major League Baseball players have reportedly entered into agreements enabling the creation of AI-driven digital avatars, allowing fans to engage directly with AI-generated versions of their favorite players. The takeaway is clear: personality and likeness are being productized. What once seemed futuristic is quickly becoming commercially relevant.

The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) established World IP Day to commemorate April 26, 1970, the date the WIPO Convention officially took effect. Each year, the occasion serves as a global reminder of the role that intellectual property plays in encouraging innovation and creativity. This year, the World IP Day theme is “IP and Sports Ready, Set, Innovate,” recognizing the increasingly complex relationship between intellectual property rights and the multibillion-dollar global sports industry.

This week in Other Barks & Bites: Judge Alan Albright indicates that he will leave the Western District of Texas bench in August to re-enter private practice; Daren Tang is reelected as WIPO’s Director General; and more.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) on Thursday agreed with a district court that several claims of an augmented reality (AR) patent are directed to abstract ideas and thus invalid under 35 U.S.C. § 101. The opinion was authored by Judge Cunningham. NantWorks LLC sued Niantic, Inc. for infringement of at least claim 1 of U.S. Patent Nos. 10,664,518 and 10,403,051 via Niantic’s AR games, Pokémon Go and Harry Potter: Wizards Unite. Niantic subsequently moved for judgment on the pleadings that six claims of the ‘518 patent were ineligible under Section 101 and the district court held that those claims were directed to the abstract idea of “providing information based on a location on a map.”

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) issued a decision Tuesday in Centripetal Networks, LLC v. Keysight Technologies, Inc., affirming in part and reversing in part a decision of the United States Patent and Trademark Office’s (USPTO) Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB). The CAFC determined that the PTAB correctly found claims 1 through 3, 5 through 13, and 15 through 20 of Centripetal Networks, LLC’s patent directed to network threat detection unpatentable for obviousness. The court reversed the PTAB’s determination regarding claims 4 and 14, finding those claims unpatentable for obviousness as well.

On April 20, Simi Valley, CA-based gaming tablet developer Gamevice filed a response to Japanese game developer Nintendo’s motion to vacate portions of a Northern District of California judgment that had invalidated Gamevice patent claims to handheld computing accessories as anticipated by the Nintendo Switch. While Gamevice acknowledged that it welcomed the vacatur of any adverse invalidity ruling, its filing points out procedural improprieties stemming from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit’s remand, which Gamevice indicated may be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

China was not the only actor being scrutinized today during a full Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, titled “Stealth Stealing: China’s Ongoing Theft of U.S. Innovation.”  Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) stood in for Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) as Chair and opened the hearing with a warning that, in addition to its blatant IP theft—which is estimated to cost the United States between $400 billion and $600 billion per year—China is more recently evolving from “imitator to innovator.” “The United States must overcome its historic and ideological views that China is unable to innovate,” Tillis said.

Intellectual property (IP) protections don’t merely shield Americans’ ideas and designs from theft—they underpin our entire economy and standard of living. Approximately 90% of the market value of the S&P 500 is in intangible assets, based on IP. Weakened IP protections erode American prosperity and human potential as IP-intensive industries support 63 million U.S. jobs and account for over 40% of America’s economic output.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) issued a decision Tuesday in In re Hybir, Inc., dismissing an appeal as moot and leaving intact the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts’s judgment granting Veeam Software Corp.’s motion to dismiss and holding that the asserted claims of Hybir’s patent were ineligible under Section 101. The CAFC determined that a settlement agreement between Hybir and Veeam Software Corp. rendered the appeal moot because the terms constituted a “side bet” on the appeal’s outcome. The opinion was authored by Judge Stoll and joined by Judge Chen and Judge Hughes.

Seven retired federal judges have filed an amicus brief supporting U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) Judge Pauline Newman’s Supreme Court petition seeking review of her case against CAFC Chief Judge Kimberly Moore for what she has dubbed Moore’s “unlawful” removal of Newman from her duties on the court. The judges’ amicus brief argues that “permitting misconduct of the sort alleged here to proceed unchecked and unexamined by the federal courts poses a grave threat to the independence of all federal judges, particularly the 50% of judges who are 68 or older.”

Today, the Council for Innovation Promotion (C4IP) published the third edition of its Congressional Innovation Scorecard, which provides a measure of each lawmaker in the U.S. Congress in terms of their impact on the nation’s intellectual property (IP) system. Although this year’s scorecard acknowledges higher numbers of pro-copyright bills introduced into Congress, it concludes that members of Congress are still failing to engage fully and effectively on national IP issues to the detriment of America’s future as an innovation leader.

This week on IPWatchdog Unleashed, I sat down with Matteo Sabattini. At the heart of our discussion was the persistent asymmetry between those who are primarily innovators and those who are primarily implementers. As I explained, many patent owners historically assumed the system would take care of itself—that “cooler heads would prevail.” That assumption has proven misguided. Over the last two decades, implementers—many of them large, consumer-facing companies—have engaged in sustained and coordinated advocacy. Innovators, by contrast, have as a group been slower to mobilize. Sabattini agreed with the diagnosis but added an important nuance. The imbalance, he argued, is not simply a failure of engagement; it is structural. “There is a numerosity problem,” he told me. “The companies investing in developing new technologies are inevitably outnumbered by companies who actually use these technologies.”

The U.S. Supreme Court today denied a petition for certiorari challenging the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit’s (CAFC’s) use of Rule 36 summary affirmances in appeals from the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB). CPC Patent Technologies petitioned the Court in March of this year asking the Justices to consider the question: “Whether the Federal Circuit can affirm a PTAB decision without opinion in contravention of the clear statutory requirement of an ‘opinion’ when reviewing such decisions.”

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday denied a petition for a writ of certiorari filed by Rebecca Curtin, leaving in place a decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) that barred her from opposing the trademark registration for “RAPUNZEL” for dolls and toy figures. The Court declined to review the CAFC’s holding that a consumer lacks the statutory entitlement to oppose a trademark registration under 15 U.S.C. § 1063 because such consumer interests fall outside the commercial zone of interests protected by the Lanham Act.

The Supreme Court’s decision to hear Hikma Pharmaceuticals USA Inc. v. Amarin Pharma, Inc. is puzzling—and revealing. On its face, the case presents a narrow question: whether a generic drug manufacturer can be held liable for inducing patent infringement based on how it markets a product approved under a so-called “skinny label.” The dispute turns on whether Hikma’s conduct plausibly encouraged physicians to prescribe its generic drug for a patented use. But the Court’s decision to grant certiorari reflects something broader: a continued focus on lowering drug prices through faster generic entry, even at the risk of undermining the patent incentives that make pharmaceutical innovation possible.