Steve Brachmann

Today, the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, Artificial Intelligence, and the Internet conducted its first oversight hearing of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) during the second Trump Administration. The harshest lines of questioning for USPTO Director John Squires during the hearing were reserved for the agency’s notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM) to reform rules of practice at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) as well as President Trump’s political influence at the agency. During the hearing, Squires also confirmed that the agency’s Patent Public Advisory Committee (PPAC) would soon be revived, following an offer to join PPAC extended last night to an undisclosed independent inventor.

Today, the U.S. Supreme Court issued an order list denying a petition for writ of certiorari filed by inventor Noah Healy to challenge rulings upholding a patent examiner’s subject matter eligibility rejection under 35 U.S.C. § 101 at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). Healy’s pro se petition challenged the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit’s decision to affirm the examiner’s rejection as violating the meaningful review requirements of the Administrative Procedures Act (APA) due to conflicting statutory theories on patentability that were never sufficiently explained by the agency.

This week in Other Barks & Bites: the Federal Circuit okays the U.S. International Trade Commission’s flexible analysis of the technical and economic prongs of the domestic industry requirement; the University of California tops the National Academy of Inventors list of top universities obtaining U.S. utility patents last year; the EU’s highest court rules that first requests for data access under the General Data Protection Regulation may be excessive if part of a systemic pattern of entering data claims for compensation; and more.

Yesterday, U.S. Senators Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law, and Peter Welch (D-VT) sent a letter addressed to Liang Rubo, CEO of Chinese technology company ByteDance, urging the immediate shutdown of ByteDance’s video generation platform Seedance 2.0. Calling ByteDance’s recent pledges to respect copyright “a delay tactic,” the Senators join a growing chorus of copyright advocates raising alarms about rampant infringement being committed by users of Seedance and other generative artificial intelligence (AI) platforms.

Last week, consumer electronics giant Samsung filed responses to requests for Director Review by patent owner Netlist in validity proceedings instituted at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB). Netlist is contending that the trials should be dismissed because Samsung failed to identify all real parties in interest (RPIs) in the PTAB petitions challenging Netlist patent claims directed to dynamic random access memory (the ‘087 patent) and memory modules for reduced noise in signal transmissions (the ‘731 patent).