Posts Tagged: "patent"

The United States patent system is not failing because Americans have stopped inventing. It is failing because the legal and institutional architecture built to protect invention no longer operates as a coherent innovation framework. Over time, the system has become a patchwork of overlapping tribunals, inconsistent legal standards, procedural inefficiencies, and doctrinal barriers that make it harder to obtain, defend, enforce, license, and rely upon even high-quality patent rights covering innovations of extraordinary consequence. Now in the coming months we will move forward with a candid, serious, historically grounded, and focused conversation on building—not merely patching—the next American patent system.

Tomorrow, June 17, the Senate HELP Committee will vote on a raft of bills aimed at making medical care more affordable. That’s a worthy goal. But in the case of the Medication Affordability and Patent Integrity Act, lawmakers are setting themselves—and patients and the rest of us—up for failure. The legislation seeks to prevent drug companies from gaming the patent system by holding these firms to new disclosure and certification requirements. How the bill is supposed to save patients money is far from obvious. What is more, there are already laws against the kind of abuse the legislation targets. And there is little to suggest those rules aren’t working.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) announced late Monday that it is designating as informative a decision based in part on USPTO Director John Squires’ recent memo outlining additional discretionary denial factors the Office will consider with respect to institution of inter partes review (IPR) and post grant review (PGR) proceedings. Specifically, the decision found that Tesla, Inc.’s evidence of manufacturing activities in the United States, “including that it manufactures the accused products in America,” favored a finding that discretionary denial is not appropriate.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) issued a decision today in Medmix Switzerland AG v. Squires, affirming a Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) final written decision that found several claims of a Medmix fluid-mixing patent unpatentable as obvious. The decision upholds the Board’s construction of a disputed claim term and its finding that a skilled artisan would have been motivated to combine the prior art references at issue.

The United States is the only country in the world where the judiciary forces patent term truncation over unrelated patent families. In Europe, China, and most other nations, the patent laws provide a “novelty only” standard for patent applications filed before the publication of a different earlier filed patent application, and a “novelty and inventive step” standard for patent applications filed after the publication of an earlier filed patent application. The law in virtually every country outside the United States works well using this framework.

Gilbert Hyatt is a prolific independent inventor known for his large number of patent applications held up for decades at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and the courts. In its decisions in Hyatt v. Hirshfeld, 998 F. 3d 1347 (Fed. Cir. 2021) (Hyatt I) and Hyatt v. Stewart, 148 F. 4th 1376 (Fed. Cir. 2025) (Hyatt II), the Federal Circuit held that he forfeited his patent rights under the prosecution laches doctrine

Many of us have spent our careers defending and promoting our patent system and related policies like the Bayh-Dole Act, which injected the authorities and incentives of patent ownership into the federal R&D system so that resulting discoveries would no longer waste away on the shelves, benefitting no one. While we usually focus on statistics, legal analysis and case studies, sometimes the impact of what we’re doing hits you square in the face. Last week, I was fortunate enough to have that happen and it’s an experience I’ll never forget.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) on Thursday affirmed a district court’s order dismissing a claim of patent infringement brought by Dynapass against Bank of America. Chief Judge Moore authored the opinion. Dynapass claimed Bank of America Corporation and Bank of America, N.A. (BOA) infringed its U.S. Patent No. 6,993,658, which covers a user authentication system in which user tokens are supplied through communication devices. Dynapass claimed Bank of America’s two-factor authentication feature of BOA’s Mobile Banking Application infringed claims 1–7 of the ’658 patent and sued Bank of America in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas

IPWatchdog’s 2026 Patent Masters Program kicked off Monday with discussions on the state of the international patent landscape and the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in creating efficiency gains in patent prosecution and portfolio building, before moving into conversations on Tuesday and Wednesday about monetization, ex parte appeal strategies and how to shape the future of the U.S patent system, among other topics.

On Monday, an arbitrator issued an order finding that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) violated federal labor law when it eliminated routine and remote telework for non-Patents bargaining unit employees represented by the Patent Office Professional Association (POPA) without first engaging in impact and implementation bargaining.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) on Tuesday reversed and remanded two Patent Trial and Appeal Board decisions that had found Google’s patents for improvements to “hotword” detection unpatentable. The opinion was authored by CAFC Chief Judge Moore. “Hotwords” are phrases like “Hey Siri” and “OK Computer” that are used to activate voice assistants. Google’s U.S. patents 10,134,398 and 10,593,330 are directed to improvements that “address the problem of triggering multiple devices with a single hotword” by suppressing the reaction in other devices while the intended device reacts.

This week on IPWatchdog Unleashed, I spoke with Rama Elluru, a former PTAB Judge turned national security policy advisor. We explore the accelerating intersection of AI, patent law, and national competitiveness, as well as the hard questions policymakers will soon face around AI-assisted inventorship, patent eligibility, drug discovery, scientific research, and whether existing legal frameworks can keep pace with technologies that are advancing far faster than Congress, agencies, and courts typically move. We also address the broader national security implications of intellectual property policy, AI-enabled fraud, workforce disruption, the need for guardrails and meaningful penalties for malicious uses of AI, and why IP must be understood as a core pillar of economic and national security strategy.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) issued a decision today in In re Zhengxu He, affirming a Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) decision upholding an examiner’s rejection of claims 1-22 of U.S. Patent Application No. 16/997,933 for obviousness. The CAFC exercised jurisdiction under 28 U.S.C. Section 1295(a)(4)(A) and found that substantial evidence supported the Board’s conclusion that the claims would have been obvious based on a combination of two prior art references.

Last week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) issued a precedential decision in Ollnova Technologies Ltd. v. ecobee Technologies ULC vacating judgments entered by the Eastern District of Texas and remanding to determine patent-eligibility issues under 35 U.S.C. § 101. The Federal Circuit remanded primarily due to the district court’s erroneous jury instructions regarding the subject matter eligibility test under Alice, and dismissed ecobee’s patentability challenge to Ollnova’s patents directed to building automation systems (BAS) that address technical challenges present in wireless networks.

Imagine a company spends millions of dollars constructing a new office building in a prime downtown location. The company pays for maintenance, utilities, insurance, landscaping, repairs, security, and taxes. The building is well designed, professionally managed, and expensive to maintain. But it sits empty. No tenants. No leases. No revenue. That would strike most executives as irrational. Yet many companies treat patent portfolios in exactly the same way. They spend millions building and maintaining patent portfolios around the world. But when asked what revenue the portfolio generates, the silence is deafening.