Posts Tagged: "patent prosecution"

In a world of unlimited resources and intellectual property (IP) legal department budgets, all invention disclosures would lead to patent application filings. But this was not the world we lived in prior to the current COVID-19 pandemic, and the pandemic has only further constrained resources for many companies. Separating the wheat from the chaff has always been a prudent part of invention harvesting. Certain disclosures simply do not merit the filing of a new patent application. Other disclosures do merit a filing, and the question then becomes how robust of a filing to draft and how widely and aggressively to prosecute it over time. When a decision is made not to file an application, does the inquiry end there? For most companies it does. But others will consider preparing what is known as a “defensive publication” covering the disclosure.

As businesses and offices prepare to reopen, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) shows its ongoing support for innovation and entrepreneurship during the novel coronavirus outbreak. Silver linings for trademark owners and patent applicants are highlighted below. It is an excellent time for trademark owners to file new applications. As noted, the downturn in the number of new applications filed has increased the processing times for marks to reach examination and proceed toward registration.

On July 29, 2019, U.S. patent application serial number 16/524,350 was filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), with the sole inventor identified as artificial intelligence named “DABUS.” The assignee, Stephen Thaler, acknowledged that the invention was made by the creativity machine, without any human input. The USPTO issued a notice of missing parts, requiring identification of each inventor by name. Thaler then petitioned that the missing parts notice be vacated, which was denied, and Thaler petitioned for reconsideration. The USPTO issued its decision on the reconsideration petition on April 29, 2020, again denying the petition and concluding that the patent laws required a natural person as an inventor. The decision asserts that conception is the touchstone of invention, as the formation in the mind of the inventor of a definite and permanent idea of the complete and operative invention as it is to be applied in practice. However, this decision is too narrowly focused, and should be reversed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit if Thaler appeals the USPTO ruling.

Since the Supreme Court’s Alice decision in 2014, many patent prosecutors in Industrial & Mechanical Technologies practice groups have been spared the headaches that the decision created for their colleagues in Electrical & Computer Technologies practice groups. So, it came as quite a surprise, perhaps unwelcome to some, when the Federal Circuit decided American Axle v. Neapco, invalidating claims for a method for manufacturing propshafts as being directed to ineligible subject matter under Section 101 of the U.S. Patent Act…. Almost six months later, it appears that Neapco was right, at least when it comes to patent prosecution in the mechanical arts. Indeed, both anecdotal evidence and prosecution data aggregated by Juristat demonstrate that the American Axle decision has not affected the prosecution of mechanical inventions before the USPTO in any significant way.

Whoever wrote the America Invents Act (AIA) left out the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) examiners. The examiner on any given patent at issue in an inter partes review (IPR) proceeding at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) agreed with the patent holder that the patent claims, as amended, were valid. Examiners are specialists, working under Supervisory Patent Examiners (SPEs), who are even more experienced, though in very narrow fields. As such, they knew the state of the art at the time a patent was being prosecuted.

On May 7, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) published a Notice in the Federal Register regarding the implementation of a new pilot program for COVID-19 related applications (COVID-19 Pilot Program). Under the COVID-19 Pilot Program, the USPTO would grant prioritized examination, similar to the existing Track One Prioritized Examination program, to applications claiming a product or process related to COVID-19, which “must be subject to an applicable FDA approval for COVID-19 use”. Under the program, requests will be granted to qualifying small or micro entity applicants without payment of the typical prioritized examination fees.

Last week, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) issued a decision refusing to vacate a Notice of Missing Parts in U.S. Patent Application No.: 16/524,350 (the ‘350 Application), titled “Devices and Methods for Attracting Enhanced Attention”, for failure to “identify each inventor by his or her legal name” on the Application Data Sheet (ADS). The ADS listed a single inventor with the given name DABUS and the family name as “Invention generated by artificial intelligence.” DABUS stands for “Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience”. The Application listed Stephen L. Thaler as the Assignee, Applicant and the Legal Representative. The USPTO denied the petition to vacate the Notice of Missing Parts.

Last week, the USPTO announced a public release of the Patent Center beta that will eventually replace PAIR and EFS-Web while providing improved access to prosecution histories and related data. The Office has always been on the cutting edge of technology for the Federal government. Their electronic filing system (EFS), Patent Application Information Retrieval (PAIR) system, hoteling, and other technology initiatives have put the Office out front of many government agencies. FY2020 Congressional Justification for the USPTO states that it is the responsibility of the USPTO to “foster[] innovation, competitiveness and job growth in the United States by … delivering IP information and education worldwide.” Open access to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) data is core to the USPTO’s mission and aligns with the Open Data policies of the Federal government generally.

The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Chief Economist today released a report, “Adjusting to Alice: USPTO patent examination outcomes after Alice Corp v. CLS Bank International,” outlining the effect of recent USPTO actions on patent eligibility determinations in certain technology areas most affected by the Alice decision. According to a USPTO press release, the conclusion is that these actions “have brought greater predictability and certainty” to these tech areas. “We have heard anecdotally from both examiners and applicants across the entire spectrum of technologies that our 2019 guidance on Section 101 greatly improved the analysis in this important area of patent law,” said Andrei Iancu, Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the USPTO in the press release. “The Chief Economist’s report now confirms this general perception, especially with its critical finding that uncertainty decreased by a remarkable 44%.” 

The year 2019 was supposed to be when subject matter eligibility examination at the USPTO got better. First, the USPTO published Revised Patent Subject Matter Eligibility Guidance in January 2019 meant to address “how to apply the U.S. Supreme Court’s [Alice] framework for evaluating eligibility [under Section 101].” 84 Fed. Reg. 50 (Jan. 7, 2019) (“PEG”). Then, the USPTO doubled down with the October 2019 Subject Matter Eligibility update (“October Update”). In contemporary parlance, you might say that 2019 was supposed to be the year that the USPTO flattened the Section 101 rejection curve. There is promising evidence that the 2019 Guidance has reduced Section 101 rejections during prosecution before USPTO examiners. See Update on 101 Rejections at the USPTO: Prospects for Computer-Related Applications Continue to Improve Post-Guidance. Unfortunately, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) does not seem to have received the memo. While the PTAB routinely refers to the 2019 Guidance in decisions on Section 101 rejections, there is at least one critical requirement of the 2019 Guidance that the PTAB appears to ignore—the requirement that an examiner must show every claim, individually, is ineligible.

The Federal Circuit on Friday reversed the Patent Trial and Appeal Board’s decision holding certain claims of Personalized Media Communications, LLC’s (PMC’s) U.S. Patent No. 8,191,091 (the ’091 Patent) unpatentable on anticipation and obviousness grounds but affirmed the decision as to the remaining claims. The Court found that the Board erred in its claim construction of one of the claim terms at issue due to its dismissal of the prosecution history. The Board rejected PMC’s reliance on the prosecution history, stating “the prosecution history presents a murky picture as opposed to a clear waiver.” The Federal Circuit disagreed with this approach and found that the prosecution history statements supported PMC’s interpretation and construction of the phrase “encrypted digital information transmission.”

I have often thought of the patent process as being like the car wash near my house – where you pull up to the entrance, to the point where an attendant shouts “neutral!”, and your car is then magically pulled through a defined series of stations until it comes out clean at the other end. The key difference being – the car wash takes five minutes, costs six bucks, and requires no effort. Not so with patents. In a way, the patent system can be seen as a far more rigorous 20-year car wash – beginning from the moment you pull into the patent office by filing your first application, thereby obtaining that all important Filing Date. You are then led along an arduous path of decisions, deadlines, and stages – all with corresponding costs. No matter when and where you might actually obtain a patent along that path, assuming you do at all, you are out the door (i.e., those patents will expire) generally 20 years to the day after you first heard “neutral!”.

As an independent inventor, I am greatly concerned about the new proposed Section 112(f) wording related to “functional claiming” that was put forward as part of the fix for patent eligibility law. While the bill is on the back burner for now, lawmakers have stated their desire to revive it. In my mind it is part of a continuing effort to prevent inventors of computer-implemented inventions from experiencing smooth sailing in patent prosecution and patent assertion. A description of what computers do and how they “logically” work has a close relationship with its physical structure. These aspects are closely interwoven and largely equivalent. Executing a computer operation means that physical circuits are activated. A computer operation or function is not a disembodied occurrence. An instruction executed by a computer is a rapid configuration/activation of one or more (usually electrical) circuits.

As an update to my posts from 2017 and 2019, it has now been more than six years since the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2014 Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank decision. Still, the IP bar awaits a clear and reliable test to determine when exactly a software (or computer-implemented) claim is patentable versus being simply an abstract idea “free to all men and reserved exclusively to none.” The USPTO’s Section 101 guidelines interpreting Alice—and the accompanying 46 examples—have not cleared the confusion, and Alice continues to distract the USPTO, courts, and practitioners from focusing properly on Sections 102 (novelty) and 103 (obviousness). The net effects still being increased cost, lower patent quality, lower patent portfolio valuations, wasted patent reform lobbying dollars and, in many instances, the denial of patent protection for worthwhile software inventions.

For the past several years, the patent offices in the United States and Mexico have operated under a type of patent examination fast-tracking and work-sharing agreement known as a Patent Prosecution Highway (PPH). This agreement between the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and the Mexican Institute of Industrial Property (IMPI) was set to expire in June of this year, and the status of the program going forward was uncertain. But on January 28, the Offices announced a new agreement that promises to improve upon the PPH system by creating an even “more streamlined approach” to obtaining a Mexican patent once a corresponding U.S. patent is granted than that presently offered under the PPH.