Posts Tagged: "patent"

Similar to Steve Martin and John Candy’s calamitous odyssey in the classic 1980s film Planes, Trains and Automobiles, patent practitioners are experiencing their own misadventures when filing applications in the DOCX format. As of January 17, 2024, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) mandated submitting all specification, claims and abstracts of non-provisional applications filed under 35 U.S.C. 111(a) in DOCX format or incurring a $400 surcharge (non-discounted). The DOCX mandate came after thousands, and likely tens of thousands, of practitioners, directly or indirectly, communicated their significant procedural, technical, legal, ethical, professional liability, and financial concerns to the USPTO.

Last week, the Judicial Conference of the United States issued guidance on recently announced changes to case assignment policies designed to prevent gamesmanship in litigation filed in U.S. district court. While the Conference’s guidance clarifies that the amendments are intended to impact patent lawsuits, where claims of judge-shopping have been rife, commentary from legal scholars highlights several issues with implementing these policy changes in the patent infringement context.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday, March 18, denied a petition filed by patent owner Jodi A. Schwendimann asking the Court to review a decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) that affirmed a Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) determination that Schwendimann’s patents were obvious. The petition specifically asked the Court to review the CAFC’s holding that Schwendimann’s argument that “justification for selection of a primary reference is a necessary step to guard against hindsight bias for the motivation to combine references” was unsupported by Federal Circuit case law.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) on Friday affirmed a district court finding that two inventors should be added as co-inventors to a patent for a method of transporting gaseous fluids. The CAFC concluded that the record “does not leave us with a definite and firm conviction that a mistake has been made” in finding the inventors contributed significantly to the invention.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) today issued a Request for Comments (RFC) that will be published in the Federal Register tomorrow seeking input from the public on how to better incentivize commercialization of innovation, particularly in green and critical or emerging technologies. According to the RFC, the comments received “will be used to evaluate possibilities for amplifying the impact of our current work, and to explore new ways to support the transfer of innovation to the marketplace.”

Efforts by high-tech companies to undermine both the Patent Eligibility Restoration Act of 2023 and the Promoting and Respecting Economically Vital American Innovation Leadership (PREVAIL) Act ramped up this week, with a joint letter sent to the Senate Judiciary Committee by a number of tech industry organizations on Monday and a campaign launched by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) yesterday.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) issued a brief opinion authored by Judge Chen today that rejected Daedalus Blue LLC’s appeal of a Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) decision finding certain claims of its patent on a data management system unpatentable. The PTAB held that U.S. Patent No. 8,671,132 was unpatentable as obvious over combinations of three prior art references: “Gelb”, “Tivoli”, and “Callaghan.” Daedalus in part argued on appeal that the Board incorrectly found that Gelb is analogous art because Gelb “is not reasonably pertinent to the problems identified in the ’132 patent.”

Artificial Intelligence (AI) stands at the forefront of innovation, transforming industries and shaping the future of global economies. Although AI innovators understand the value of intellectual property (IP) protection for their innovations, they often don’t know how to secure the right kind of IP protection for their innovations. Employing a process for systematically mining AI innovations to create a map of those innovations is one option for identifying the most suitable form(s) of IP protection to obtain, based on the innovation and the business model within which that innovation will be commercially deployed.

The Judicial Conference of the United States announced yesterday that it is strengthening its policy on random case assignments in order to limit the practice of judge shopping in U.S. district courts. According to the press release, the policy would assign judges via a district-wide random selection process in “all civil actions that seek to bar or mandate state or federal actions, ‘whether by declaratory judgment and/or any form of injunctive relief.’”

On March 11, U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Director Kathi Vidal issued an order on rehearing that upheld the attorney’s fee award levied against petitioner OpenSky Industries over its abuse of process during inter partes review (IPR) proceedings at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB). Although Director Vidal’s order delayed the date by which OpenSky must pay, the ruling nixed OpenSky’s challenges to the more than $400,000 attorney’s fee award in favor of patent owner VLSI.

In what has to be the unkindest cut of all, those expected to benefit from the proposed misuse of march-in rights so the government can impose drug price controls say they don’t support it either. The proponents promoting this hot house theory have seen it denounced by those who created the Bayh-Dole Act as being unauthorized under their law and seen evidence they can’t refute that it would have little impact on drug prices but would devastate small business entrepreneurs in all fields of federally supported research and development. And now they’ve lost the generic drug industry.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) on Thursday, March 7, vacated a decision of the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) that had held unpatentable certain claims to CoolIT Systems, Inc.’s patent. U.S. Patent 9,057,567 is titled “Fluid Heat Exchange Systems” and is directed to a system for fluid heat transfer to cool electronic devices. On appeal to the CAFC, CoolIT argued that the PTAB erred in construing one of the claim terms, “matingly engaged” and that even under the PTAB’s construction, the asserted prior art did not meet the matingly engaged limitation.

This week was an above-average one for patent filings in both the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) and in district courts. The PTAB had two new post grant review (PGR) petitions and 39 new inter partes review (IPR) petitions, for a total of 41 new filings. And the district court also had heightened activity with 75 new filings.

On February 8, 2024, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued a precedential decision in Weber, Inc. v. Provisur Technologies, Inc., reversing the finding of the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) that certain operating manuals with limited dissemination and confidentiality restrictions did not qualify as prior art. The Federal Circuit’s decision concluded that the Board misapplied the analysis for meeting the public accessibility standard for a printed publication to qualify as prior art.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) issued a precedential decision today reversing the Western District of Texas district court’s indefiniteness analysis and explaining that it improperly found a contradiction between two claim limitations to arrive at its indefiniteness holding. Amperex Technology Limited filed an action seeking declaratory judgment of noninfringement and challenged the validity of certain claims of Maxell, Ltd.’s U.S. Patent No. 9,077,035 for a rechargeable lithium battery and Maxell asserted infringement of the patent in a separate action. The two actions were consolidated in the Western District of Texas and the court ultimately held that two of the “wherein” clauses of the sole independent claim 1 of the ‘035 patent contradicted one another.