Posts in IP News

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) on Thursday reversed a Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) finding that Google had failed to prove one claim of a patent directed to CAPTCHA-like technology unpatentable. The opinion was authored by Judge Taranto and the panel included Chief Judge Moore and Judge John H. Chun of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington, sitting by designation.

In our latest IPWatchdog Unleashed podcast, I spoke with Rob Sahr, shareholder at Wolf Greenfield and co-chair of our 2025 Life Sciences Masters™ program. Our conversation zeroed in on a hard truth the public rarely sees: moving a molecule from early discovery to an FDA-approved therapy requires a chain of scientific and economic miracles—and every one of them leans on a reliable patent system. In this conversation we discuss the extraordinary journey from molecule to medicine. Together, we explore how scientific breakthroughs depend not only on research and capital, but also on a stable and predictable patent system. From double patenting and government funding to judicial uncertainty and policy headwinds, our conversation dives into the fragile balance between innovation and patent policy—and the many scientific miracles required to bring new drugs to life.

Practitioners in the high-stakes world of the International Trade Commission (ITC) are familiar with the formidable power of a Section 337 remedial order. The threat of a cease-and-desist order, backed by civil penalties of up to $100,000 a day or twice the value of imported goods, is a powerful deterrent. For years, the process for enforcing these penalties has been a settled feature of ITC practice. But a recent Supreme Court decision, Jarkesy v. SEC, has introduced a new constitutional question that ITC litigators might want to watch out for.

One of the ways judges typically evaluate whether a ruling makes sense is to game out the logical consequences of the ruling to see whether it will lead to absurd results. There is little doubt that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit’s prosecution laches doctrine isn’t just doctrinally off-base—it leads to absurd results, which makes the doctrine structurally unworkable. The Federal Circuit’s presumption that any patent taking more than six years to prosecute is presumptively unenforceable places the burden on patent owners to demonstrate as a threshold matter that the length of prosecution was reasonable. But the brutal, inconvenient truth is that the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) itself has twice operated secret programs that froze applications for years while telling the outside world nothing.

For the past five years, I have taught Legislation & Regulation at Oklahoma City University School of Law—a course at the crossroads of administrative law, statutory interpretation, and the legislative process. Each semester, my students and I return to a central inquiry: when, if ever, should courts defer to agency interpretations, and when must judges exercise their own independent judgment? That question has taken on new urgency in the wake of the Supreme Court’s recent restructuring of administrative law.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) on Tuesday issued a precedential decision in Duke University v. Sandoz Inc., reversing a judgment from the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado and finding claim 30 of U.S. Patent No. 9,579,270 invalid for lacking an adequate written description. The ruling overturns a $39 million jury verdict finding that Sandoz Inc. infringed the patent owned by Duke University and Allergan Sales, LLC, which covers the eyelash growth drug, LATISSE. The opinion was authored by Circuit Judge Stark and joined by Judges Dyk and Stoll.

In 1980, the Supreme Court decided Diamond v. Chakrabarty, the seminal Section 101 case holding that non-natural, man-made organisms are patent eligible. The Court’s decision paved the way for substantial investment in the then-nascent biotech industry. Forty-five years later, one would think that there’s little room to debate the patent eligibility of genetically engineered host cells—particularly a host cell that can produce non-native viral plasmids and proteins useful in making life-saving, gene-based medicines. But that debate is front and center in Regenxbio v. Sarepta, a pending appeal at the Federal Circuit that follows more recent Supreme Court and Federal Circuit decisions that have turned Section 101 into a short-cut for bringing patent challenges under Sections 102, 103, and 112.

Today, the U.S. Supreme Court denied a pair of petitions for writs of certiorari filed by motion sensing camera developer Gesture Technology that challenged rulings by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit upholding agency invalidations of patent claims, including several past their date of expiration. In denying cert, the Supreme Court leaves in place precedential decisions from the Federal Circuit expanding the public rights doctrine from Oil States to expired patents even though the patent owner has lost the right to exclude infringers, fundamental to Oil States’ reasoning on the public’s “interest in seeing that patent monopolies are kept within their legitimate scope.”

Welcome to the very first installment of Cool AI Patents of the Month. Each month, we’ll look at some of the more eye-catching and creative ways Artificial Intelligence (AI) is showing up in innovations that themselves wind up represented in patents or patent applications. The goal isn’t to get overly technical, but to highlight technology that’s genuinely cool and thought-provoking — the kind of inventions that make you say, “Wow, that’s clever.”

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit on Friday affirmed a district court’s award of attorney’s fees to an accused infringer due to the “substantive weakness” of the patent owner’s litigation position. The opinion was authored by Judge Reyna. Hawk Technology Systems LLC sued Castle Retail LLC in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Tennessee, claiming infringement of its U.S. Patent No. 10,499,091, titled “High-quality, Reduced Data Rate Streaming Video Production and Monitoring System.” The district court ruled that the patent is directed to the abstract idea of “video storage display” under Alice Step one and that nothing transformed the abstract idea into patent eligible subject matter at step two and granted Castle’s request for dismissal under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 12(b)(6).

This week in Other Barks & Bites: Huawei announces that it earned $630 million USD in patent licensing revenues last year; the U.S. Supreme Court nixes CPC Patent’s cert petition challenging the Federal Circuit’s Rule 36 practice on the same day that it faces another Rule 36 ruling; WIPO’s World Intellectual Property Indicators report shows that patent application filings at China’s patent office increased nearly 10% last year while WIPO’s IP awareness report shows major strides in the Asia-Pacific region; and more.

The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) today released its second edition of the WIPO Pulse comprehensive survey, titled “Global intellectual property perception survey 2025,” analyzing the perceptions of intellectual property of 35,500 respondents in 74 countries that represent approximately 80% of the target population aged 18 to 65 worldwide between February 20 and April 25.

Today, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued a precedential decision in Smartrend Manufacturing Group (SMG), Inc. v. Opti-Luxx Inc. reversing and vacating an infringement ruling from the Western District of Michigan following a jury verdict for patent owner SMG in a case over illuminated school bus signs. In assessing Opti-Luxx’s challenge to Smartrend’s expert testimony offered on the perspective of ordinary observers, the Federal Circuit strongly hinted that such testimony could support design patent infringement allegations by drawing upon relevancy principles from the utility patent context.

The World Intellectual Property Organization’s (WIPO’s) new Treaty on Intellectual Property, Genetic Resources and Associated Traditional Knowledge, adopted in May 2024, would impose additional disclosure obligations on patent applicants under the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT). Specifically, it would require disclosure of traditional knowledge and genetic resources even when those details have no bearing on patentability.