Posts Tagged: "patent office"

“Qualified women are unnecessarily excluded from membership in the patent bar,” wrote Mary T. Hannon in a recent law review article seen by Senators Mazie Hirono (D-HI), Thom Tillis (R-NC) and Chris Coons (D-DE), who promptly sent a letter to United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Director Andrei Iancu demanding answers. A scandal of epic proportions in 2020 if an agency of the executive branch is actively excluding women from the ranks of patent practitioners. But it’s just not true.

The European Patent Office (EPO) issued a press release and 75-page study on December 10, titled “Patents and the Fourth Industrial Revolution – the global technology trends enabling the data-driven economy,” which examined global trends in innovation in fourth industrial revolution (4IR) technologies. As used in the study, 4IR denotes “the full integration of information and communication technologies (ICT) in the context of manufacturing and application areas such as personal, home, vehicle, enterprise and infrastructure,” and it marks a “radical step towards a fully data-driven economy.” The study examined international patent families (IPFs), i.e., inventions for which patent applications have been filed in two or more patent offices, related to 4IR worldwide between 2000 and 2018. The study revealed that, between 2010 and 2018, global patent filings for 4IR technologies, including smart connected objects, Internet of Things, Big Data, 5G, and Artificial Intelligence (AI), grew at an average annual rate of almost 20%, which is nearly five times faster than the average of all technology fields.

The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) launched their INSPIRE (Index of Specialized Patent Information Reports) “database of databases” on November 4, 2020. It provides useful summaries of patent databases to help both novice and expert patent searchers identify the most suitable search system. WIPO’s ultimate goal was to speed up the pace at which innovation takes place. To do this, INSPIRE identifies database features without commenting on any strengths or weaknesses of products. At the time of writing, INSPIRE listed 23 databases, both free and subscription. Content was still being added to the collection and there was scope for more sources to be included.

On December 4, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) designated three Patent Trial and Appeals Board (PTAB) decisions as precedential.  In Apple Inc. v. Uniloc 2017 LLC, the PTAB refused to institute inter partes review (IPR) based on Apple’s “follow-on copycat petition.” SharkNinja Operating LLC v. iRobot Corporation and Applications in Internet Time, LLC v. RPX Corp. both related to real parties in interest (RPI). In SharkNinja, the PTAB declined to engage in a lengthy analysis to consider whether a non-party must be named as an RPI and in Applications in Internet Time the PTAB found the non-party to be an RPI and denied institution.

As we head into the holidays, district court patent filings were down (51) and settlements/terminations up (51), with another 32 petitions filed before the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB). The filings for the Board are fewer than usual in general, though given that frequent filer WSOU provoked at least eight inter partes reviews (IPRs) from Huawei, driving the number up a tad. Once-frequent filer Empire IP resurfaced with a number of new suits, too. What are the odds we have a quiet end of the year?

Submissions in response to the United States Patent and Trademark Office’s (USPTO) “Request for Comments on Discretion To Institute Trials Before the Patent Trial and Appeal Board” were received through the deadline of December 3, 2020. The Request was published in the Federal Register on October 20, 2020 and a total of 843 comments were received. IPWatchdog previously highlighted comments from individuals and organizations including Senator Thom Tillis, Robert Stoll, Conservatives for Property Rights, US Inventor’s Randy Landreneau and the Small Business Technology Council. Below are some additional highlights from the many submissions.

On November 17, 2020, in SIPCO LLP v. Emerson Electric Co., No. 2018-1635, slip op. (Fed. Cir. Nov. 17, 2020), the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit extended the reasoning of the Supreme Court in Thryv, Inc. v. Click-to-Call Technologies, LP, 140 S. Ct. 1367 (2020) barring appeal of decisions to institute inter partes review (IPR) under 35 U.S.C. § 314(d), and held that decisions made by the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) to institute proceedings for covered business methods (CBMs) are not subject to appeal under 35 U.S.C. § 324(e). While the CBM transitional program of the America Invents Act (AIA) expired on September 16, 2020, the statutes applied when instituting and conducting review under the program were those of post-grant review (PGR) (under § 18(a)(1) of the AIA), and so the effect of the Federal Circuit’s decision in SIPCO is likely to be much more far-reaching.

On December 2, eComp Consultants (eComp) filed an amicus brief urging the U.S. Supreme Court to find Administrative Patent Judges (APJs) of the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) in U.S. v. Arthrex, Inc., Nos. 19-1434/-1452/-1458. In its brief, eComp argues that the U.S. Supreme Court should reverse the decision of the Federal Circuit and confirm that APJs of the PTAB are merely inferior officers of the United States who were, therefore, constitutionally appointed. eComp’s Amicus Brief clarifies the errors in the Federal Circuit’s decision. 

New petitions stayed steady again this week at 29, while district court patent filings were one shy of 100, on the strength of at least 35 new complaints by various IP Edge subsidiaries. A number of known-financed entities launched suits or added defendants; Xerox launched a rather serious suit against three social media giants; and the Board denied some petitions based on trial dates and also on there being a significant relationship between suppliers and customers (in the Mitek cases).

As of December 1, 750 comments had been received in response to the United States Patent and Trademark Office’s “Request for Comments on Discretion To Institute Trials Before the Patent Trial and Appeal Board”, which was published in the Federal Register on October 20. Some notable submissions have been received from stakeholders including Senator Thom Tillis, Conservatives for Property Rights, Randy Landreneau, Robert Stoll and the Small Business Technology Council.

On November 25, the Federal Circuit affirmed a decision of the Patent Trial and Appeal Board in VidStream LLC v. Twitter, Inc., in which the PTAB held VidStream’s patent claims unpatentable as obvious over the applied prior art. In particular, the CAFC affirmed the PTAB’s holding that Twitter properly established an earlier filing date of a reference based on evidence submitted in a reply brief.

While it has been said that the how and why of patent application drawings are usually best left to the professionals, I do think it is important for everyone – from the solo inventor to the big firm practitioner – to have a general understanding of the basics of utility application drawings. It is nice to be able to rely on an illustration service to get everything right for you; however, as the person with the name on the patent application, you are ultimately responsible for the content and form of the drawings that are submitted. This article will touch on the fundamentals of a utility drawing. While you may not be creating the drawings, it is crucial that you have an idea of what to look for in order to be compliant with U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) guidelines.

Patent owners often obtain patents to protect products, as well as complementary products or use cases associated with those products. However, when selling or licensing the patented products, a patent owner may inadvertently extinguish potential revenue streams associated with the complementary use cases due to the doctrine of patent exhaustion. Patent exhaustion follows the basic idea that if a company sells or licenses a patented product to a buyer, the company cannot sue the buyer (or a third party that the buyer provides the patented product to under the license) for patent infringement for using the product. Patent owners should take care when preparing and licensing patents to ensure that infringement claims for complementary products or use cases associated with patented products are not exhausted by the sale or licensing of the patented products, as shown by the Federal Circuit case of Helferich Patent Licensing v. New York Times, 778 F.3D 1293 (Fed. Cir. 2015).

Currently, brain recording and/or brain stimulation is used almost entirely for medical or research purposes. Invasive surgery is generally required to read neural signals with high temporal and spatial resolution. High resolution of neural signals enables researchers to decode a brain’s underlying intentions, sensations, reactions, etc. rather reliably, if only in constrained environments. With regard to stimulation, researchers have demonstrated the ability to trigger different types of effects. For example, stimulating the reticular formation can cause a subject to become awake; stimulating the amygdala can evoke fear; stimulating the motor cortex can trigger movement; stimulating the visual cortex can cause a subject to see light flashes. However, the state of the art is neither able to decode complex and unrestrained thoughts nor cause a subject to have a particular “target” complex thought. At least not yet.