Posts Tagged: "Patent Trial and Appeal Board"

Today, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) issued a ruling in Rideshare Displays, Inc. v. Squires affirming decisions by the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) that Rideshare’s patent claims to systems and methods of vehicle identification were obvious over prior art. The Federal Circuit’s decision also reversed the PTAB’s partial grant of Rideshare’s motions to amend, finding the substitute claims’ subject matter did not provide a technological solution rendering the claims patent-eligible at Step Two of the Alice/Mayo patent eligibility framework.

Timing is everything in the world of American innovation. On September 16, 2025, I hand delivered a petition for rulemaking to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) seeking a simple, long-overdue fix: clarify by rule that “cancellation” of a patent claim means the end of rights prospectively, not erasure of decades of hard-earned reliance, contracts, and value. After living this process, I know firsthand how timing and retroactivity can destroy the lives and businesses of those who play by the rules.

This is a response to Robert Grantham’s recent post titled “Patents Subjected to IPRs are the Perfect Vehicle to Assess the USPTO’s Patent Quality Problem.” This post claims to challenge my recent article titled “Fallacy Dispelled: Invalidation Rates of Adjudicated Patents Convey Nothing About Quality of All Issued Patents.” However, the post does not challenge my article, but instead falsely knocks down a strawman the post invented by mischaracterizing my article.

Today, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) issued a precedential decision in Bayer Pharma Aktiengesellschaft v. Mylan Pharmaceuticals Inc. affirming-in-part a final written decision by the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) invalidating Bayer’s patent claims for methods of reducing the risk of cardiovascular events in patients. The Federal Circuit nixed Bayer’s arguments that the claim term “clinically proven effective” requires proof of clinical efficacy, although the appellate court did agree that the PTAB erred in construing a different claim term, vacating and remanding the Board’s decision with respect to some of Bayer’s claims.

Last week, a petition for writ of certiorari filed by patent owner Lynk Labs was docketed at the U.S. Supreme Court. Lynk Labs is challenging rulings at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) regarding the scope of invalidating prior art that can be asserted in inter partes review (IPR) proceedings at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB). Lynk Labs argues that the patent application supplying part of the PTAB’s obviousness determination was improperly treated as a printed publication despite remaining unpublished until after the critical date of Lynk Labs’ challenged patent claims.

As we reported he would be yesterday, John Squires today was officially confirmed by the U.S. Senate to be the next Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) as part of an en bloc vote on 48 pending Trump nominees. The confirmations were made by a vote of 51-47.

This essay is a response to the recently published article by Ron Katznelson, PhD, titled “Fallacy Dispelled: Invalidation Rates of Adjudicated Patents Convey Nothing About Quality of All Issued Patents. Katznelson discloses that he wrote the Government Accountability Office (GAO) requesting correction of two recent reports because the GAO asserts that Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) invalidation rates are a factual indicator of overall patent quality. Katznelson contends there is no relationship between PTAB patent invalidation and overall examination quality. I argue the opposite.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) on Monday in Motorola Mobility LLC v. Largan Precision Co., Ltd. affirmed a Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) decision that upheld claims 1-27 of Largan Precision Co., Ltd.’s U.S. Patent No. 9,696,519, which Motorola Mobility LLC had challenged via inter partes review (IPR).

In a letter sent to the Senate Judiciary Committee last week, former Deputy General Counsel for IP and Solicitor at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), Thomas Krause, urged the Senate to quickly confirm John Squires as USPTO Director to end what he called the “unaccountable governance” of the Office by Acting Director Coke Morgan Stewart.

In this week’s episode of IPWatchdog Unleashed, we dive into the intricacies of patent enforcement with Scott McKeown, a partner with Wolf Greenfield and author of PatentsPostGrant.com. McKeown, who has a reputation as one of America’s top practitioners at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB), shares insights into the continually evolving landscape of patents, patent litigation, PTAB challenges and regulatory upheaval at the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). We specifically discuss the biggest issues facing the USPTO generally, and the PTAB specifically, namely, the increase in discretionary denials under the Trump Administration, the fact that across all aspects of government it seems we are governing by memorandum, how what we are seeing at the USPTO now is a snap back from the past several years but can’t be expected to last forever, the demise of the patent examiners union, and more.

This week, U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Acting Director Coke Morgan Stewart posted another round of Director Discretionary Denial decisions to the PTAB Decisions page, almost all of which denied institution to America Invents Acts (AIA) patent validity trials. Stewart’s recent rulings generally confirm the trend so far that a patent owner’s settled expectations with respect to patents that have been in force for six years or more hold significant weight, although in two cases this trend was bucked.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) on Friday partially reversed and partially vacated a Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) ruling that rejected a pro se applicant’s patent application claims as patent ineligible and indefinite. Brian McFadden appealed the PTAB’s decision holding his U.S. Patent Application No. 16/231,749 unpatentable under 35 U.S.C. §§ 101 and 112. The application relates to improvements for information exchange in social media networks and specifically claims a “system and methods for controlling and optimizing information distribution between users in an information exchange.”

Yesterday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued a precedential decision in Global Health Solutions LLC v. Selner affirming the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) in the first appeal of a derivation proceeding under the America Invents Act (AIA) litigated at the Board. Although the Federal Circuit corrected the PTAB on the proper analysis for derivation proceedings in light of the AIA’s related first-to-file provisions, the appellate court found no reversible error in the Board’s determination that Marc Selner could not have derived the invention at issue from GHS’ inventor because Selner proved an earlier conception of the invention.

In the latest Director Discretionary Denial decisions to issue from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), Acting Deputy Chief Administrative Patent Judge Kalyan K. Deshpande denied institution in six inter partes reviews (IPRs) brought by Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. and Samsung Electronics America, Inc against GenghisComm Holdings, LLC over mobile communications patents—some of which are only three years old. USPTO Acting Director Coke Morgan Stewart recused herself from the decisions due to a conflict and delegated her authority to Deshpande via a Notice of Delegation.

About half of the patents adjudicated in district courts and at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) are found invalid. It is shown here, however, that patent invalidity rates found in adjudication will necessarily range around the 50% point regardless of the underlying validity of the stock of all issued patents. Unfortunately, there are those who infer a fallacy from such adjudication statistics: that about half of all issued patents are also invalid.