Posts Tagged: "patents"

Times are changing at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB)! Not only are there rumors that the Senate IP Subcommittee may be a matter of several weeks away from marking up the PREVAIL Act and voting it out of committee, but the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has finally issued a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) relating to several changes to the Code of Federal Regulations as they pertain to patent challenges at the PTAB.

AlexSam, Inc. lost its patent infringement cases against Simon Property Group/Blackhawk Network and Cigna Corporation in two separate decisions issued by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) on Monday, April 1. AlexSam owns U.S. Patent No. 6,000,608, which discloses a “multifunction card system.” Essentially, the invention is a type of gift card that “can serve a number of functions, thus allowing the consumer to have one card which may act as their card for financial transactions, long-distance telephone calls, loyalty information, and medical information.”

The U.S. Supreme Court’s flimsy eligibility jurisprudence offers the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) several “softball pitches” to avoid a patent bloodbath. To date, the Federal Circuit has struck out at preserving the patent system — at least twice without really even taking a swing! The first softball pitch appears in the High Court’s initial decision to exalt judge-made “exceptions” over the 200-year-old statutory rule, namely, Mayo v. Prometheus.

On March 27, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) issued a decision in Rady v. The Boston Consulting Group affirming a lower court’s invalidation of patent claims covering improvements to physical asset provenance via blockchain. The ruling, though marked non-precedential, arguably expands the application of the abstract idea exception to patentability under 35 U.S.C. § 101 for blockchain technologies even when those patents are claiming the use of specialized, non-generic computer hardware.

The Supreme Court has never quite grasped the distinction between patent eligibility and patentability. Eligibility involves entire subject matter categories or fields of inventive enterprise, like the categories “process, machine, [article of] manufacture, or composition of matter.” 35 U.S.C. 101. Ascertaining eligibility should therefore require little more than checking the patent title and ensuring that, in the words of the venerable Judge Giles Rich, “[the invention] produces a useful, concrete and tangible result.”  State Street Bank v. Signature Fin. Group, 149 F. 3d 1368 (Fed. Cir. 1998). In simple terms, Section 101 requires little more for eligibility than a showing that an invention has applied natural principles to achieve a concrete purpose within the expansive categories articulated by Thomas Jefferson in 1793. Patentability, on the other hand, proceeds as a detailed claim-by-claim, feature-by-feature examination of “the conditions and requirements of this title.” 35 U.S.C. 101. Ironically this fundamental distinction that eludes the Supreme Court is explicit in the statutory language of 35 U.S.C. 101 itself.

The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) recently released new guidance to patent examiners on making obviousness rejections. The guidance focuses on post-KSR precedential jurisprudence from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. Some of the guidance is fairly mundane, some of it is not. The purpose of this article is to propose a few responses one might use to counter rejections that apply certain problematic aspects of the new guidance.

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.”

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has been working diligently towards introducing a system supporting the submission of new patent applications in structured text, particularly utilizing the DOCX format, over the past few years. This transition has recently been realized, as the Office officially implemented DOCX filing starting from January 17, 2024. This consideration of filing in DOCX format stemmed from a Proposed Rule issued by the USPTO on July 31, 2019.

On March 5, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) issued a precedential decision in Pfizer Inc. v. Sanofi Pasteur Inc. affirming lower rulings by the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) that invalidated Pfizer’s patent claims and denied motions to amend (MTA). Although the Federal Circuit vacated the PTAB’s MTA denials with respect to two patent claims, the ruling adds new contours to the appellate court’s case law on obviousness in ways that could affect companies that are patenting chemical inventions with claimed numerical ranges.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) in a precedential decision today mostly upheld a district court ruling that found Chewy, Inc. did not infringe several claims of one IBM web advertising patent and that granted summary judgment of patent ineligibility on certain claims of another. However, the decision, authored by Chief Judge Kimberly Moore, reversed the district court’s finding of noninfringement on one of the five asserted claims of one patent, remanding the case for further proceedings on that issue.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) today published a Federal Register Notice (FRN) announcing a notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM) that would make permanent certain aspects of the Motion to Amend (MTA) Pilot program and revise rules around the burden of persuasion governing MTAs. The MTA pilot program for America Invents Act (AIA) proceedings at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) stems back to March 2019, when the Office published a notice of pilot program in the Federal Register announcing that patent owners would have the opportunity to seek preliminary guidance on MTAs from the Board itself. The pilot program also offered the opportunity for patent owners to file revised MTAs following a petitioner’s brief in opposition to the original motion to amend. Since launching the pilot program, the USPTO has twice extended the date for terminating the program, which is currently set to run through September 16, 2024.

Writing a useful and enforceable patent application is not an easy task. A number of articles show how to draft a patent application. For example, Gene Quinn of IPWatchdog published a series of articles with tips to avoid mistakes or pitfalls. Automated software and AI-assisted drafting tools have also become available, but there have been ethical and practical concerns about relying on AI. Instead of discussing the specific details of the steps in writing a patent application or the pros and cons of automated or AI tools, I will focus on the overall strategies or approaches.

On February 26, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued a precedential decision in Freshub, Ltd. v. Amazon.com, Inc., affirming a ruling by U.S. District Judge Alan Albright of the Western District of Texas in the face of appeals from both parties to the case. The Federal Circuit left the lower ruling intact after finding that the record developed at trial did not establish clear error with regards either to Freshub’s patent infringement allegations or Amazon’s inequitable conduct defense.

In an ideal world, issued patents would not contain errors. In reality, patent drafting is tedious and time-consuming work and perfection is not an attainable goal. The patent industry seems to be steadily getting better, though. In a recent study, we uncovered an 11.24% decrease in errors per patent over the past four years. We observed this decrease by reviewing every patent issued by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) since 2020 – nearly 1.4 million patents.