Posts in USPTO

Kahoot AS! filed a petition for writ of certiorari on July 24 asking the U.S. Supreme Court to consider whether the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s (USPTO’s) “settled expectations” doctrine for denying inter partes review (IPR) requests is authorized under the patent statute. The petition also asked the High Court whether 35 U.S.C. § 314(d) bars judicial review of that question.

Current U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Chief Administrative Officer Anne Mendez has reportedly been appointed Acting Deputy Director of the USPTO, following Coke Morgan Stewart’s announcement this week that she will be leaving her post early. As Chief Administrative Officer, Mendez heads up all “administrative service support functions” for the Office, which includes “human capital strategy, human resource management, telework policy and programs, facilities management, safety and security, transportation, and asset and records management.”

On Tuesday, IFI CLAIMS Patent Services released its annual report on artificial intelligence patenting, IFI Insights: Inventing AI. According to the report, worldwide AI patent grants reached 107,279 in 2025, marking the first time the total has surpassed 100,000 in a single year. The figure also represents an 83% increase over the past three years. Globally, AI patent applications reached 209,518 in 2025, of which 23% related to generative AI and 9% related to agentic AI, which is up from 5% in IFI’s previous study.

IPWatchdog has learned that U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Deputy Director Coke Morgan Stewart sent an email to USPTO executive staff today informing them that she will be leaving the Office to return to the private sector. Stewart reportedly told Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick and USPTO Director John Squires earlier today that she will be leaving by the end of this week.

In the space of a few months, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit and the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts delivered two decisions that, read together, change how patent applicants and their counsel should approach the deceptively simple question of who invented what. Fortress Iron, LP v. Digger Specialties, Inc., No. 2024-2313 (Fed. Cir. Apr. 2, 2026), holds that if an inventorship error cannot be corrected under 35 U.S.C. § 256, the patent is invalid — full stop, no intent required. Inline Plastics Corp. v. Lacerta Group, Inc., No. 1:18-cv-11631 (D. Mass. Nov. 13, 2025), holds that if an inventorship omission was intentional, the entire patent family is unenforceable for inequitable conduct — the Therasense penalty at full weight.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) on Thursday granted motions to dismiss as moot two appeals from an International Trade Commission (ITC) determination in which the ITC found Cartessa Aesthetics LLC violated Section 337 via infringement of Hydrafacial LLC’s patent, but suspended enforcement of an exclusion order because the patent was about to expire. The CAFC also vacated the underlying ITC determination.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) today published a Federal Register Notice proposing to amend the rules of practice to require that third-party requests for ex parte reexamination of a patent must include a statement identifying all real-parties-in-interest (RPIs) to the proceeding. According to the proposed rule, statements identifying RPIs would be kept confidential upon request and “would provide the Office with a mechanism to evaluate statutory estoppel provisions” as well as “enhance the Office’s ability to respond to false certifications, misrepresentations, and fraud.”

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.”

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.’

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 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.

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.