With nearly 800 cases adjudicated or pending thus far at the Unified Patent Court (UPC), a possible procedural gap has appeared in the European patent system: no clear legal mechanism currently exists to resolve conflicting...more
The Unified Patent Court (UPC) is transforming the way patents are enforced and challenged in Europe with its broad jurisdiction and potential for harmonizing the patent enforcement situation in a significant part of the...more
Tasked with starting an innovation protection and patent development program at your company but do not know where to begin? This three part series describes the key components to a patent development program for any company,...more
It is now over 10 years since the Bilski decision was handed down by the United States Supreme Court. In that decision and several other decisions that followed (i.e., Mayo, Myriad, and Alice), the Supreme Court pronounced...more
A design patent protects the visual ornamental characteristics of an article, including consumer and industrial products, medical devices and related tools, sports equipment, jewelry, product packaging, and even web-based and...more
The Federal Circuit recently ruled that state sovereign immunity does not apply in Inter Partes Review (IPR) proceedings, closing another America Invents Act (AIA) loophole. The case, Regents of the University of Minnesota v....more
In recent years, software patents have come under fire from legislation (the American Invents Act) that has generally made patents easier to invalidate, and from court decisions (the Supreme Court’s decision in Alice v. CLS...more
On November 2, 2016 the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) issued a memo to Examiners on its stance on subject matter eligibility in response to the McRO and BASCOM Federal Circuit decisions, previously...more
Disavowal can occur when a patent holder disavows the full scope of claim terms in the specification or during prosecution (e.g., through the doctrine of prosecution history estoppel). In either event, disavowal requires...more
On Thursday, May 12, 2016, the Federal Circuit reversed a lower court’s finding of invalidity under 35 U.S.C. § 101, as an unpatentable abstract idea, of a software patent concerning a “self-referential” database in Enfish v....more