Posts in Government

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) on Tuesday vacated and remanded a decision for a patent owner against Apple, concluding that the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) made several errors in finding the claims of the speech recognition patent at issue were not shown to be unpatentable. Zentian Ltd. owns U.S. Patent No. 10,839,789, which is titled “Speech recognition circuit and method.” Apple petitioned for inter partes review (IPR) of multiple claims of the patent, arguing in relevant part that “claim 1 was obvious over prior art reference U.S. Patent No. 5,819,222 (“Smyth”) or the combination of Smyth and U.S. Patent No. 6,832,194 (“Mozer”) and that claim 29 was obvious over Smyth, Mozer, and several other references.”

As government contractors rapidly integrate LLMs and generative AI into their operations, regulators are scrambling to adapt to shifting data ownership requirements.  The General Services Administration (GSA) recently proposed a new GSAR clause (552.239–7001) to standardize AI procurement, and the current draft has been met with widespread industry criticism. By asserting expansive government ownership over “data outputs” and “custom development,” the proposed rule inadvertently exposes a fault line between government data protection and commercial IP rights.

On December 31, 1959, Calixto Lopez led armed men into the Arechabala family’s rum distillery in Cárdenas, Cuba. The family had made rum there since 1878, building Havana Club into a brand whose English name reflected its success in the U.S. market. According to testimony Ramón Arechabala gave the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2004, Lopez pointed a machine gun at him and announced he was taking over as “Pepe,” the nickname of the company’s president and Ramón’s uncle. The family’s rum business now belonged to the Cuban government.

On Friday, the Federal Circuit affirmed a Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) decision invalidating claims of Woodway’s treadmill patent after rejecting the patentee’s central argument that the Board had improperly construed the claim term ‘running surface.’

In a precedential decision authored by Judge Hughes on Thursday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) vacated-in-part and remanded a decision of the Court of Federal Claims that had awarded 4DD Holdings, LLC, and T4 Data Group, LLC $12,683,065.86 for the U.S. government’s infringement of their copyrighted software TETRA®. 4DD sued the Department of Defense (DOD) and the Department of Veterans Affairs (DVA) for infringement of its copyrighted software, TETRA, which served as an interoperability solution for military healthcare records stored by the two agencies in separate databases (dubbed the “Defense Medical Information Exchange (DMIX) program).

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) issued a decision today in ASSA ABLOY AB v. CPC Patent Technologies Pty Ltd., affirming Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) final written decisions that upheld the validity of several claims covering a biometric access control system. ASSA ABLOY AB and its affiliates, including HID Global Corp., ASSA ABLOY Global Solutions, Inc., and Master Lock Company LLC, argued the Board misconstrued a key claim term and ignored one of its unpatentability theories, but the CAFC found neither argument persuasive.

An inventor pastes an unfiled disclosure into a chatbot to clean up the wording. An associate runs a draft specification through an AI tool to pressure-test claim support. A client forwards the analysis an AI gave them about their own case. All routine now, and each has produced a warning that AI quietly destroys patent rights: the prompt becomes prior art, novelty is lost, inventorship is corrupted, the application turns suspect. Some of those warnings are real. Most misidentify what went wrong.

The full U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing Tuesday, titled “From Genes to Machines: the Patent Eligibility Debate,” during which witnesses testified about the pros and cons of reforming U.S. patent eligibility law, with human genome patentability featuring as a key sticking point. While the hearing became heated at times—mostly over the peripheral topic of drug pricing—witnesses and Committee members ultimately seemed willing to work together on language that might move the bill forward.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) issued a decision Monday in Google LLC v. Parus Holdings, Inc., vacating a Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) final written decision that upheld two claims of a voice browsing patent owned by Parus Holdings, Inc. The court found that the Board made multiple errors under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) in rejecting Google’s obviousness challenge and remanded the case for further proceedings.

As the full Senate Judiciary Committee prepares to hold a major hearing on the state of U.S. patent eligibility law tomorrow, Amy Semet, Associate Professor of Law at the University at Buffalo School of Law, through her affiliation with the IP Policy Institute, has published a research paper providing the first empirical data on subject matter eligibility issues for artificial intelligence (AI) patents asserted in U.S. district court litigation. The research paper finds that not only are AI inventions invalidated at a higher rate than non-AI inventions, but also, unexpectedly, that obviousness invalidations for AI patents are low due to an incredibly high rate of subject matter eligibility invalidations in the sector.

When the Senate Judiciary Committee examines the Patent Eligibility Restoration Act (PERA)      this week, lawmakers won’t simply be debating patent law. They’ll be deciding whether America remains the best place in the world to invent tomorrow’s technologies. That question has taken on new urgency following a series of Supreme Court decisions. In the wake of those rulings, inventors, investors, and even judges have struggled to determine whether many groundbreaking discoveries qualify for patent protection.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) issued a precedential decision Friday in Intellectual Pixels Limited v. Sony Interactive Entertainment LLC, affirming a Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) decision that held claims 1 through 12 of U.S. Patent No. 10,681,109 unpatentable as obvious. The ruling followed a second final written decision the Board issued after the case was remanded from an earlier Federal Circuit appeal.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) issued a decision today in In re Magnolia Medical Technologies, Inc., affirming a Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) decision from an ex parte reexamination that found claim 1 of U.S. Patent 10,039,483 anticipated and therefore unpatentable.

Broad functional genus claiming was previously a standard strategy for innovators seeking IP protection for antibodies. Prior guidance from the USPTO, including the “newly characterized antigen” test, encouraged broad claiming of antibodies based upon their function alone. For decades, that effectively allowed innovators to claim much more than they in fact discovered in practice. In the wake of the Supreme Court’s Amgen decision, courts have adopted the reasoning articulated in Amgen to strike down functional genus antibody claims for lacking either enablement or written description.