Posts in Inventors Information

Last Tuesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit issued an opinion in Thaler v. Perlmutter affirming the denial of a copyright application filed by artificial intelligence (AI) developer Dr. Stephen Thaler to an image created by one of Thaler’s generative AI systems. Although the appellate court did not categorically reject registrability of all AI-generated works, the D.C. Circuit agreed with the agency that the Copyright Act of 1976 requires all eligible work to be authored in the first instance by a human being.

As President Trump’s executive order mandating federal employees to return to the office ignites national debate, it underscores a glaring irony for inventors like me—those whose lives and businesses have already been upended by a remote government system that wields immense power with little accountability.

Today, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued a brief ruling in Telit Cinterion Deutschland GmbH v. 3G Licensing S.A., largely affirming a final written decision by the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) that nixed Telit’s validity challenge to substitute claims submitted during inter partes review (IPR) proceedings.

I liked reading the always-excellent Rob Greenspoon’s post about five (almost) instant fixes to the patent system. The next U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Director would do well to read that post. Intellectual property rights are greatly important to America’s economy, and an efficient and well-functioning USPTO is critical to ensuring that such rights are protected. Here are five more (almost) instant fixes that I would ask the next Director to implement.

The U.S. Senate held a nomination hearing to vet Donald Trump’s pick for Secretary of Commerce, Howard Lutnick, this past week. While much of the hearing focused on issues outside of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), Lutnick touched on several key points relevant to the intellectual property system.

Inventors and innovative companies welcomed the news that the new administration immediately appointed Coke Morgan Stewart as Acting Director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). Challenges lie ahead. But for first time since the Andrei Iancu years (or before that, the David Kappos years), innovators feel confident that the leader of “America’s Innovation Agency” grasps the importance of strong and reliable patent rights.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) today announced the findings of two reports conducted by third-party academic economists and submitted to Congress late last year, as required by the Unleashing American Innovators Act of 2022 (UAIA). One report examined the impact of patent application fees on entry into patenting, while the other focused on the USPTO’s fee structure and addressed issues such as “the potential impact on small and micro entities, whether fee structure changes are needed, and recommendations for administrative and legislative action.”

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) today released an official Artificial Intelligence Strategy aimed at outlining the challenges faced by the Office both internally and externally, as the reach of AI impacts all aspects of innovation and society. According to the report, AI-related patent applications are up 33% since 2018 and appeared in 60% of all technology subclasses in 2023.

Donald Trump’s appointment of Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to head the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has given hope to many people who are impacted by inefficiency in government. One such group is American inventors, who seem to have been forgotten this election cycle in the midst of all the talk concerning those impacted by the Departments of Education and Labor. 

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) on Monday, January 13, issued a precedential decision denying a state law conversion claim as being preempted by patent law and rejecting BearBox LLC owner Austin Storms’ bid to be named a sole or joint inventor on Lancium LLC’s patent. U.S. Patent No. 10,608,433 is titled “Methods and Systems for Adjusting Power Consumption Based on a Fixed-duration Power Option Agreement” and is owned by Lancium, a software and tech company that provides power management solutions for data centers such as those used for bitcoin mining. Storms is a Bitcoin miner and the owner of BearBox, which was founded “to design and develop mobile cryptocurrency datacenters,” according to the CAFC opinion.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) today affirmed a Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) decision that upheld an examiner’s rejection of certain claims of a patent application for a cancer immunotherapy invention. The opinion was authored by Judge Lourie.

An important new book about the impaired U.S. intellectual property (IP) system, The Big Steal – Ideology, Interest, and the Undoing of Intellectual Property, by Jonathan M. Barnett, reveals the deepening failure of IP rights to retain their property status and the weaknesses – seen and unseen – that have accompanied it. The focus of The Big Steal is on what the IP system’s recent failures impact, who they benefit, and what can be done to repair the damage.

On December 30, Acting U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Director Derrick Brent filed an intervenor’s brief with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in an appeal brought by inventor Carrie Hafeman, following several inter partes review (IPR) proceedings filed against her patents by tech giants Google and Microsoft. While Hafeman seeks the reversal of final written decisions invalidating her patent claims due to the violation of a Sotera stipulation that had led to the PTAB’s institution, the USPTO brief mainly points to the unappealable nature of PTAB institution proceedings. The case calls into question whether Sotera stipulations, presumably filed to prevent duplicative validity arguments in U.S. district court and at the PTAB, are enforceable at the agency where such stipulations are cited in instituting patent validity trials.

Imagine a pharmaceutical researcher in 2015 searching for new drug candidates to treat a rare disease. Through traditional methods, they might screen a few thousand compounds over several months, carefully evaluating each candidate’s potential based on known chemical properties and biological mechanisms. Fast forward to 2025: using modern AI tools, that same researcher can screen millions of compounds in days, with the AI system predicting binding affinities, potential side effects, and even suggesting novel molecular structures that human chemists might never have conceived. This dramatic expansion of capabilities raises a crucial question for patent law: Has the widespread adoption of AI tools fundamentally changed what constitutes “ordinary skill” in drug discovery?

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) on Tuesday in a per curiam decision affirmed two Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) decisions for Microsoft, agreeing that the challenged claims of two patents directed to matching tasks to different computer processor types to improve processing efficiency were invalid for obviousness.