Posts in Inventors Information

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) on Friday issued a precedential decision denying a number of inventors’ associations standing to sue the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) for failing to amend alleged inaccurate language on the cover of issued U.S patents. District Judge Rachel Kovner of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, sitting by designation, authored the precedential opinion of the court.

Yesterday, a petition for writ of certiorari was filed at the U.S. Supreme Court taking aim at the federal judiciary’s conflation of subject matter eligibility with other areas of the patent statute, a growing concern in U.S. patent law since the Court decided Alice v. CLS Bank International (2014). Arguing that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit used a single observation to answer both steps of the Alice/Mayo inquiry, the petitioner urges the Court to correct the Federal Circuit’s replacement of its flexible two-step Section 101 framework with rigid proxies that avoid the evidentiary safeguards of other patentability statutes.

Red Tape Index (RTI), a project of the regulatory intelligence platform Labrynth, published a patent index today placing the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) below every peer office measured on the price, speed, and openness of the patent system. The Patent Friction Index assigned the United States a composite score of -42.62, a figure that stayed negative under every alternative scoring rule tested.

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 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.”

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 today in Sansone v. United States Patent and Trademark Office, affirming the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia’s dismissal of a pro se inventor’s lawsuit and denial of his motion for summary judgment. Stanley Sansone filed U.S. Patent Application No. 16/255,511 on January 23, 2019, seeking a patent for a wearable thermal device, but a patent examiner rejected all claims. The Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) affirmed the rejection, after which Sansone sought continued examination.

Gilbert Hyatt is a prolific independent inventor known for his large number of patent applications held up for decades at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and the courts. In its decisions in Hyatt v. Hirshfeld, 998 F. 3d 1347 (Fed. Cir. 2021) (Hyatt I) and Hyatt v. Stewart, 148 F. 4th 1376 (Fed. Cir. 2025) (Hyatt II), the Federal Circuit held that he forfeited his patent rights under the prosecution laches doctrine

Have you ever drafted a claim set with a second claim that began, “the system of claim 2, wherein…” when you meant to write “the system of claim 1”? It’s embarrassing because every first-year patent attorney knows that a dependent patent claim cannot depend on itself. However, making the error is inevitable when you draft a large number of patent applications. The good news is, if you upload such a claim to today’s Patent Center (where patent applications are filed), you will be provided with the following alert: “The claims appear to contain an improper dependency with at least one claim that depends on a missing or canceled claim. Please review and revise if necessary”. How beautiful is this? Now you can self-correct before your patent application is even filed. Ten years ago, you would have to go back and forth with a patent examiner to correct the error.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) issued a precedential decision Friday in Hafeman v. Google LLC affirming Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) final written decisions (FWDs) invalidating all claims of three related patents owned by inventor Carolyn Hafeman.  The court also dismissed Hafeman’s argument that the inter partes reviews (IPRs) should have been terminated based on the district court’s finding that LG–a real party in interest to the IPRs–violated its Sotera stipulation.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) issued a decision today affirming the dismissal of a pro se lawsuit brought by three inventors who contested the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s (USPTO) refusal to grant them reduced filing fees. The CAFC found that the inventors failed to adequately plead Article III standing, as their own representations to the USPTO undermined any claim of ownership in the disputed application.

On Tuesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit issued a published opinion in Malone v. U.S. Patent and Trademark Office affirming the Eastern District of Virginia’s grant of summary judgment to the USPTO after finding that the agency properly withheld documents sought by US Inventor’s Josh Malone pursuant to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request related to administrative patent judge (APJ) paneling at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB). The Fourth Circuit found that decision drafts circulated to nonpanel APJs were subject to FOIA’s exemption for predecisional and deliberative documents and were not unprotected ex parte communications.

A person recently approached me at church with excitement regarding a software process he developed. His company was so pleased with the result that it is filing a patent, listing him as the inventor. This person knew that I had some kind of patent backstory, so he asked for my thoughts. My name is Jeffrey A. Killian, and I am the patent applicant in the Federal Circuit Court case # 2021 -2113 (In Re: Killian). I took no pleasure in telling my  friend at church that his patent application will be rejected. Plus, the official notice will have my precedential case quoted all over his rejection. With friends at church like me, who needs enemies? 

The University of North Carolina at Charlotte brought together leaders from government, academia, industry, and the defense community for its 2026 Invention of the Year Awards, an evening that showcased the university’s growing role as a national engine of innovation, commercialization, and technological impact.