Posts in Technology & Innovation

Enanta Pharmaceuticals v. Pfizer has been widely characterized as a case that turns on the acceptance or rejection of an alleged typographical error in a provisional patent application. That characterization is inaccurate. The alleged typographical error is a distraction that obscures the fact that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit analyzed the case under the wrong legal framework. Properly understood, Enanta is not about a typo at all; rather, the dispositive question is whether the inventors possessed the invention prior to the public disclosure of the allegedly infringing compound.

When the world’s best golfers descend on Royal Birkdale in Southport, England, for the 154th Open Championship, they arrive at golf’s oldest major — the tournament that has defined the sport since 1860. Played on the windswept links where the game forged its traditions, The Open has always celebrated history. But this year, it also marks the arrival of something entirely new.

Yesterday, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) published a report on the global patent landscape for generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies showing that newly published patent families in the sector increased more during 2024 and 2025 combined than the preceding decade. While the United States has enjoyed greater annual growth rates in published patent families in the sector, six of the top 10 patenting entities are located in China, underscoring the dominant position that country is securing in an incredibly valuable and critical sector of emerging technology.

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.

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 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.

A faith-technology company has done something the IP world should notice. Gloo — a Boulder, Colorado, firm that serves churches, ministries, and Christian universities, and now trades on the Nasdaq — built a benchmark it calls Flourishing AI Christian, or FAI-C. The finding is blunt: Today’s leading large language models, tested on questions of meaning, character, and faith, come up short. On a 100-point flourishing scale, the frontier models averaged 61. On the faith dimension, they scored worst of all.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) issued a decision today in Dental Monitoring SAS v. Align Technology, Inc., affirming a district court ruling that found several patent claims covering deep learning based dental image analysis invalid as directed to ineligible subject matter under Section 101. Dental Monitoring SAS owns U.S. Patent 11,049,248 and U.S. Patent 10,755,409, both of which relate to dental arch image analysis. The ‘248 patent covers “a method for assessing the shape of an orthodontic aligner using a deep learning device,” while the ‘409 patent covers a method for acquiring and analyzing an image of a dental arch using the same type of device.

The House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, Artificial Intelligence, and the Internet held a hearing on Tuesday, titled “A Midlife Crisis? IP and the Internet After 40.” The hearing examined the changes that have occurred over the last four decades of the internet and featured witnesses including celebrities, academics and computer and media experts.

Over the past year, while advising clients on standard essential patent (SEP) matters and following the rapid development of SEP litigation in Brazil, I found myself revisiting a question that foreign clients often ask: Is Brazil really a jurisdiction where patent rights can be effectively enforced? The question is particularly common among technology companies evaluating enforcement strategies across multiple jurisdictions. While Brazil is one of the world’s largest markets, many foreign patent owners remain less familiar with its courts than those of the United States, Europe, China or Japan. Recent SEP litigation provides an interesting lens through which to answer that question.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) issued a precedential decision today in Otsuka America Pharmaceutical, Inc. v. Hetero Labs Limited, affirming a preliminary injunction that blocks Hetero Labs Limited from launching a generic version of the neurological drug Nuedexta. The court also vacated a district court order that had excused Otsuka from posting a bond pending appeal, remanding the issue for further proceedings. Circuit Judge Dyk dissented in part from the majority’s claim construction and would have reversed the injunction.