Posts Tagged: "Kathi Vidal"

Today the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), which is now being led by Acting Director Coke Morgan Stewart, rescinded former USPTO Director Kathi Vidal’s 2022 memo, titled “Interim Procedure for Discretionary Denials in AIA Post-Grant Proceedings with Parallel District Court Litigation.” That memo explained that the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) “will not deny institution of an IPR or PGR under Fintiv (i) when a petition presents compelling evidence of unpatentability; (ii) when a request for denial under Fintiv is based on a parallel ITC proceeding; or (iii) where a petitioner stipulates not to pursue in a parallel district court proceeding the same grounds as in the petition or any grounds that could have reasonably been raised in the petition.”

Former U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Director Kathi Vidal, now with Winston & Strawn, filed an amicus brief on Wednesday in an appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) of a district court decision upholding a jury verdict that Ollnova Technologies’ patent claims were not ineligible at step two of the Alice-Mayo patent eligibility framework.

On the heels of Donald Trump’s election win last week, U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Director Kathi Vidal today announced on her personal LinkedIn page that she has internally informed the USPTO staff she will be resigning from her post as of the second week in December. Deputy Director Derrick Brent will take over until the incoming Trump Administration appoints a new Director.

Representatives of intellectual property provisional organizations in Israel, including the Israel Patent Attorneys Association and the Israeli AIPPI, recently wrote to U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Director Kathi Vidal to voice concerns relating to the anonymous examiner who several weeks ago took to Reddit to discuss examining the patent application of an unidentified Israeli defense contractor. Reddit User Snoo_86350 posted to a patent examiner Reddit group explaining that they had been assigned to an application owned by an Israeli military company and that they had mixed feelings about allowing the application after “watching news about Columbia campus protests” and being unable to stop “thinking of Gaza Strip where about 2 million Palestinians live, can’t escape and bombarded.” (sic)

As we have reported recently, IPWatchdog broke news last week about a Reddit thread dedicated to purported patent examiners in which one examiner asked their peers for advice on how to approach examination of patents that have purposes they may fundamentally disagree with politically–specifically, a patent geared toward Israeli military technology. At the time the story broke, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) indicated that it does not, as a general practice, comment on “unverified statements by anonymous commenters on Reddit or any other social media platform.”

United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Director Kathi Vidal on April 19 vacated a decision of the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) that had denied institution of an inter partes review (IPR) for a lighting system patent owned by Rotolight Limited. Videndum Production Solutions challenged claims 1–19 of U.S. Patent No. 10,845,044 B2 via IPR and Rotolight argued the petition should be discretionarily denied under the factors set forth in General Plastic Industries Co., Ltd. v. Canon Kabushiki Kaisha.

U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Director Kathi Vidal vacated and remanded a decision of the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) on Friday that had denied institution of an inter partes review (IPR) requested by auto parts manufacturer, Mahle Behr Charleston, Inc. U.S. Patent No. RE47,494 E is owned by inventor Frank Amidio Catalano and covers “a device to prevent corrosion [in motor vehicle radiators] caused by electrolysis.” Mahle Behr requested IPR of the patent, arguing that a prior art reference called Godefroy anticipates and renders obvious certain claims.

U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Director Kathi Vidal on Monday made public an order from December awarding VLSI Technology LLC $413,264.15 for “time spent addressing OpenSky’s abusive behavior” in a years-long and circuitous case between the two companies. Vidal first issued her precedential Director review ruling in October 2022, holding that inter partes review (IPR) petitioner OpenSky Industries, LLC abused the IPR process in its conduct with patent owner, VLSI Technology LLC, and sanctioning OpenSky by excluding it from the IPR proceedings by relegating it to be a “silent understudy” in the proceedings and “temporarily elevating Intel to the lead petitioner.”

U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Director Kathi Vidal issued an Order last week in a sua sponte Director Review proceeding asking the parties to Spectrum Solutions LLC v. Longhorn Vaccines & Diagnostics, LLC and any interested amici to weigh in on the appropriate sanctions remedy when a party withholds evidence in an America Invents Act (AIA) proceeding.

Clarity, transparency and integrity were themes consistently referenced by U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Director Kathi Vidal during a lunchtime fireside chat with IPWatchdog Founder and CEO Gene Quinn on Day 3 of IPWatchdog LIVE 2023. Throughout the discussion, which ran the gamut from the agency’s current rulemaking to potential issues with emerging technologies, Director Vidal strongly encouraged public participation from stakeholders to improve the functioning of the nation’s patent and trademark-granting agency.

If a sanctions order is the stuff of a Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) practitioner’s bad dreams, then the issuance of sanctions outright cancelling a client’s patent(s) qualifies as their worst nightmare. That nightmare happened to Longhorn Vaccine (“Longhorn”) in April of this year, when the PTAB canceled five  of its patents as sanctions for Longhorn’s violation of the duty of candor relating to withholding test data that the PTAB deemed relevant to the patentability of the challenged claims. A month later, U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Director Kathi Vidal sua sponte ordered Director Review of PTAB’s sanctions order. We now await her decision. This article examines the PTAB’s unprecedented sanctions order in the context of Director Vidal’s recent crackdown on inter partes review (IPR) abuses and provides guidance as to what practitioners can do now to avoid accusations of misconduct before the PTAB.

A little over halfway through 2023, and nearing the end of the Patent Trial and Appeal Board’s (PTAB’s) fiscal year, we can take stock of an administrative body that is settling into a decade of precedent while big changes still loom. Unlike prior years, where policy changes resulted in statistical swings for institution rates, outcomes, amendment practice, and the like, this year has been more of an extension of previous trends (though institution rates are still creeping higher).

Today’s hearing of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property and the Internet on Oversight of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) demonstrated some confusion on the part of Congress about the intent of USPTO Director Kathi Vidal’s recent Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPRM) on changes to Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) processes, and suggested the Subcommittee members believe she may be exceeding her authority.

U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Director Kathi Vidal held a virtual conversation with the intellectual property (IP) press on Wednesday to coincide with a one-year anniversary Director’s blog post published today. “If last year was about listening…this is really the year where we’re trying to bring that to impact,” said Vidal. Vidal said the work she did in her first year in office was about providing clarity and sometimes learning from “unintended consequences,” but this year is going to be about implementation based on the feedback they’ve been provided via the various requests for comments, listening sessions and other initiatives the Office has undertaken. “We now have more knowledge to shape real policy,” Vidal said.