By Scott B. Amankwatia "Decoding Motivation to Combine Principles in Key Rulings" as published in the 2023 APELLATE YEAR IN REVIEW from the PTAB Bar Association (Download the PDF here) In 2023, the Federal Circuit issued several opinions addressing motivation to combine in the context of inter partes review. As we will see in Axonics [...]
By Michelle E. O’Brien and Tom Irving The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit today affirmed the U.S. Patent Office’s findings that claims in four patents were unpatentable because they are not patentably distinct from claims in other patents in the same family. In re Cellect, LLC, Nos. 2022-1293, 2022-1294, 2022-1295, 2022-1296 (August [...]
By Tom Irving and Michelle E. O’Brien In a much-anticipated decision, today the Supreme Court affirmed invalidity of two Amgen patents in Amgen Inc., et al. v. Sanofi, et al. (Case No. 21-757), with Justice Gorsuch writing for a unanimous Court. The case is of particular interest because it pits one brand pharma company, [...]
By Tom Irving and Michelle E. O’Brien As the co-authors predicted in their presentation at the IPO annual meeting last year, today the Supreme Court denied certiorari in Teva Pharms. USA, Inc. v. GlaxoSmithKline LLC, Case No. 22-37. The materials presented during that meeting, which were prepared with the assistance of Stacy Lewis of [...]
If a product sells successfully, it is only a matter of time before a competitor copies the design of the product and begins selling a competing version. If the copying is exact, design patents and copyrights on the original design can provide a fairly straight forward avenue for stopping the copying competitor. However, if the [...]
The Federal Circuit has provided further clarification to the troublingly unclear “abstract idea” concept originally articulated by the US Supreme Court. According to the Supreme Court, patent protection does not extend to the patent ineligible concepts of laws of nature, natural phenomena, and abstract ideas, which are “building blocks of human ingenuity...We must therefore distinguish [...]
A Big Win For Enforcing Copyright In China It can seem daunting for US companies to enforce intellectual property rights in China, but one US company, Electro-Harmonix Co. ("EHX"), just had a big win against software pirates in China. EHX makes high-end music equipment, and their software for various guitar effects pedals was being copied [...]
On November 16, 2018, The Federal Circuit held that yet another set of claims is “not directed to an abstract idea,” reversing a lower court decision dismissing a suit by Ancora Technologies Inc. asserting that HTC Corp. had infringed its patent. Ancora’s patent covers technology that prevents a software program from running on a computer [...]
In the United States, one of the requirements to get a patent is that the claimed invention must not have been previously “described in a printed publication.” See 35 U.S.C. § 102(a)(1). While seeming a simple requirement, the question many inventors have is “what does “a printed publication” actual mean?” Intuitively, inventors understand that a [...]
In a non-precedential opinion, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has overturned a decision by the Patent Trial and Appeal board that upheld the rejection of one of Facebook’s patent applications. The application (U.S. Pat. App. No. 13/715,636) claims a method for displaying a set of images after reshuffling or resizing the [...]
