Over the past six years, since the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Mayo Collaborative Services, Inc. v. Prometheus Laboratories, it has become more and more evident that correction of the path embarked upon by the...more
Legal creativity in argument is the lifeblood of the litigator's craft, and nowhere more than in patent litigation in view of the complexities of the law applied to technological fact. But occasionally creative arguments can...more
Sherry Knowles, former chief patent counsel of GlaxoSmithKline, and Dr. Anthony Prosser, a member of her team at Knowles Intellectual Strategies LLC, have written an article recently published in The John Marshall Review of...more
U.S. District Court Judge Susan Illston stuck again on Christmas Eve, giving the biotech patent community a rhetorical lump of coal in their stocking by invalidating on summary judgment claims directed to methods for...more
One of the limitations of our judicial system is that it is inefficient in overcoming error. This drawback is most pronounced at the Federal Circuit, where precedential decisions can only be overcome by en banc...more
U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Director Andrew Iancu gave the introductory keynote address at the 46th Annual Meeting of the Intellectual Property Owners (IPO) Association on Monday, and his talk provided the prospect of a...more
Like Sherlock Holmes' quiet dog, the significance of the Supreme Court's patent eligibility jurisprudence following their decision in Mayo Collaborative Services v. Prometheus Laboratories, Inc. and Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank...more
Method of Treatment Claims Patent Eligible Even without Reciting Dosages -
It appears that Judge William C. Bryson, U.S. Appellate Court Judge on the Federal Circuit bench, is riding the circuit these days, peripatetically...more
The tortured path that the Federal Circuit has taken (a path also trodden by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and the district courts) of applying the patent eligibility decisions under Mayo Collaborative Services v....more
In the wake of President Trump's decision to withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the other countries involved in negotiations (Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore,...more
Damned if you do . . .
Great cases like hard cases make bad law. For great cases are called great, not by reason of their importance . . . but because of some accident of immediate overwhelming interest which appeals to...more
In the general chaos that has resulted from the Supreme Court's recent forays into trying to delineate the proper standards for patent subject matter eligibility (AMP v. Myriad Genetics, Mayo Collaborative Labs v....more
Like the Intellectual Property Owners (see "What to Do about Section 101? IPO Provides Its Answer") and the IP Law Section of the American Bar Association (see "ABA IP Law Section Sends Section 101 Revision Proposal to USPTO...more
The Intellectual Property Law Section of the American Bar Association (ABA-IPL) sent today to continuing U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Director Michelle Lee a letter containing its proposal for revising 35 U.S.C. § 10i in...more
In the aftermath of the Supreme Court's decision not to grant certiorari in Sequenom v. Ariosa (and in some quarters, considerably before that), many have voiced the opinion that only Congress can resolve the acknowledged...more
A great deal of angst has been generated by the Patent Trial and Appeal Board's decision, in Ex parte Itagaki and Nishihara, regarding the panel's application of Section 101 (sua sponte as a new ground of rejection under 37...more
Perhaps one of the most influential first year law school classes for the task of learning how to "think like a lawyer" is civil procedure. Particularly when the professor is bold enough to engage students on the intricacies...more
Despite an understandable amount of gloom and doom in patenting circles regarding the effects of the recent Supreme Court and Federal Circuit jurisprudence on life sciences patents (Mayo v. Prometheus; AMP v. Myriad Genetics;...more
9/1/2016
/ AMP v Myriad ,
Ariosa ,
Biotechnology ,
Global Economy ,
Investment Funds ,
Investors ,
Life Sciences ,
Mayo v. Prometheus ,
Patent-Eligible Subject Matter ,
Patents ,
Product of Nature Doctrine ,
Sequenom ,
Venture Capital
On May 4th the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office issued its latest Guidance on how Examiners are to apply recent U.S. Supreme Court and Federal Circuit precedent related to subject matter eligibility (see "USPTO Issues Update...more
7/19/2016
/ Ariosa ,
New Guidance ,
Paid Time Off (PTO) ,
Patent Examinations ,
Patent-Eligible Subject Matter ,
Patents ,
Petition for Writ of Certiorari ,
Pharmaceutical Industry ,
Pharmaceutical Patents ,
Product of Nature Doctrine ,
Sequenom ,
USPTO
As we have had the occasion to say before regarding subject matter eligibility, "[o]ne swallow does not a summer make, nor one fine day . . . ," but the Federal Circuit may have engendered a glimmer of hope that it will once...more
A few years ago, former PTO Solicitor General Nancy Linck arose from the audience at the BIO International Conference to provide her thoughts on how the Office had responded to the Supreme Court's decisions in Mayo v....more
Sequenom filed its anticipated petition for certiorari today for Supreme Court review of the Federal Circuit's decision in Ariosa v. Sequenom. The petition advises the Court that it "should take this opportunity to provide...more
Earlier today, we presented a live webinar on the "Top Patent Law Stories of 2015." The webinar covered seven of the twenty stories that made it onto Patent Docs ninth annual list of top patent stories. The seven stories...more
1/22/2016
/ America Invents Act ,
Chevron Deference ,
CLS Bank v Alice Corp ,
En Banc Review ,
Limelight v Akamai ,
Patent Infringement ,
Patent-Eligible Subject Matter ,
Patents ,
Sandoz v Amgen ,
Section 101 ,
Sequenom ,
USPTO
The Federal Circuit declined to rehear en banc the panel decision in Ariosa v. Sequenom. This decision was not surprising but what may be surprising was that only three judges wrote opinions, one in dissent (Judge Newman)...more
The diplomats negotiating the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement have done the seemingly impossible: they have kept the details of the draft agreement secret from the press and interested parties in the United States,...more
10/16/2015
/ AMP v Myriad ,
Biologics ,
BPCIA ,
CLS Bank v Alice Corp ,
Copyright ,
Fast Track Process ,
GATT ,
Innovation ,
Intellectual Property Protection ,
Mayo v. Prometheus ,
Obama Administration ,
Patent-Eligible Subject Matter ,
Patents ,
Popular ,
SCOTUS ,
Trademarks ,
Trans-Pacific Partnership ,
TRIPS Agreement ,
WTO