Money-Saving Licensing Tips for Startups
PODCAST: Williams Mullen's Trending Now: An IP Podcast - Cease and Desist Letters: Protecting Your Intellectual Property the Right Way
PODCAST: PODCAST: Williams Mullen's Trending Now: An IP Podcast - Cease and Desist Letters: Protecting Your Intellectual Property the Right Way
A Counterintuitive Approach to Winning Without Litigation: One-on-One with Haley Morrison
SkadBytes Podcast | Tech’s Shifting Landscape: Five Trends Shaping the Conversation
Tips for Conducting a Trade Secret Assessment with Rob Jensen
Will I Get Sued if I Create Another Hospital Drama? — No Infringement Intended Podcast
Essential Steps to Sell Your Business
Mickey Mouse: un ratón con abogado
(Podcast) The Briefing: The Ninth Circuit Puts the Brakes on Eleanor’s Copyright Claim
The Briefing: The Ninth Circuit Puts the Brakes on Eleanor’s Copyright Claim
Unexpected Paths to IP Law with Dan Young and Colin White
Why Can't I Clean the Graffiti Off My Walls? — No Infringement Intended Podcast
(Podcast) The Briefing: Trademark Smoked: The Fall of General Cigar’s COHIBA Registration
The Briefing: Trademark Smoked: The Fall of General Cigar’s COHIBA Registration
PODCAST: Williams Mullen's Trending Now: An IP Podcast - NCAA Name, Image, Likeness (NIL) Update – Effects of House Settlement
How IP Can Fuel Your Startup's Growth
Tariffs and Trade Series: What Senior Management Teams Need to Know
5 Key Takeaways | AI and Your Patent Management, Strategy & Portfolio
Two Key Considerations in NIL Deals
Cell and gene therapies represent a transformative frontier in modern medicine, offering potential cures for previously untreatable conditions. However, securing intellectual property (IP) protection for these innovations...more
In a year defined by landmark decisions, impactful announcements and new standards, clarity in the patent world comes as a welcome relief. It arrived via a federal circuit court decision in August 2024 that settled certain...more
Predictions about the arrival of fault-tolerant quantum computing and commercially viable quantum computing vary widely. Some experts estimate that within the next three to five years, we may see early quantum advantage in...more
The concept of the "person of ordinary skill in the art" (POSITA) remains pivotal in patent law, particularly in evaluating obviousness under 35 U.S.C. § 103 and compliance with enablement and written description requirements...more
Determining whether a claimed invention is obvious under 35 U.S.C. § 103 often depends on whether the prior art provides a clear motivation for modifying existing knowledge. Central to this analysis is the concept of a...more
While courts have often warned that hindsight bias should be avoided when assessing whether a patented invention would have been obvious to the skilled person, the application of this principle can be challenging in practice....more
Bearbox LLC v. Lancium LLC, Appeal No. 2023-1922 (Fed. Cir. Jan. 13, 2025) In this week’s Case of the Week, the Federal Circuit affirmed a district court’s determination that appellants Bearbox and Austin Storms—Bearbox’s...more
While Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions, such as predictive AI, have been around for decades, generative AI systems are recent innovations with far reaching implications for patent law. Generative AI, such as ChatGPT,...more
As 2024 draws to a close, several crucial developments — some aimed at modernizing long-standing legal practices, others addressing emerging challenges — have reached patent law. Originally published in Law360 - December...more
The Patent Trial and Appeal Board determined that a reference could be used as prior art because patent owner failed to provide sufficient evidence that the prior art’s disclosure was invented by all four named inventors, and...more
It is well-established that the availability of a prior art reference is dependent on the “effective filing date” of a patent or patent application. Any practitioner seeking to invalidate a patent knows that the ideal...more
The Situation: Even after the introduction of the European Unitary Patent Court, Germany remains a key battleground in major patent litigations. In the bifurcated German litigation system, nullity cases are heard before the...more
In a Final Written Decision, the PTAB declared claims of a patent unpatentable after finding the patent was not entitled to the earlier priority date of the anticipatory reference in Platinum Optics Technology, Inc. v. Viavi...more
Recent guidance published in the Federal Register by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) explains some of what is required by patent examiners in making an obviousness case under 35 U.S.C. § 103. Since it is...more
A global consensus seems to be forming that an artificial intelligence (AI) system does not deserve—at least for now—to be named as an inventor on a patent application. The question is under consideration and being settled in...more
Precedential Decisions - Penumbra, Inc. v. RapidPulse, Inc., IPR2021-01466, Paper 34 (March 10, 2023) (designated: November 15, 2023) (regarding prior art status under AIA § 102) The Director designated as precedential...more
A patent does not give the owner the right to do anything. Rather, it gives the patent owner the right to exclude others from making, using, selling, offering to sell, and/or importing the claimed invention, which most...more
At the Inter Partes review trial, Patent Owner attempted to swear behind Petitioner’s primary prior art reference by showing that the inventors of the asserted patents had conceived of the invention before the priority date...more
On August 22, 2023, the Federal Circuit affirmed an IPR Final Written Decision holding claims to deuterated derivatives of ruxolitinib unpatentable as obvious and rejected the patentee’s argument that a skilled artisan would...more
In 2022, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued six opinions regarding U.S. design patents: three precedential opinions and three unprecedential opinions. Unlike 2021 (where the two precedential opinions on...more
As part of the recovery from the global COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit took steps to return to normal operations. It began requiring live oral arguments in August 2022 and, by November,...more
An invention developed by a business or individual inventor may have great value to that business or individual, either through the commercialization of the invention or by licensing the invention to others in return for a...more
[co-author: Jamie Dohopolski] Last year, the continued global COVID-19 pandemic forced American courts to largely continue the procedures set in place in 2020. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit was no...more
UNIVERSITY OF STRATHCLYDE v. CLEAR-VU LIGHTING LLC - Before Reyna, Clevenger, and Stoll. Appeal from the Patent Trial and Appeal Board. Summary: The Federal Circuit reversed the PTAB’s obviousness decision because the...more
Can an employee’s unpatentable “idea”, conceived under a duty to assign intellectual property, give rise to co-ownership in an invention conceived after employment terminates? That was the question on appeal in Bio-Rad...more