Posts Tagged: "SCOTUS"

Relish Labs LLC and the Kroger Company (who own the “Home Chef” brand and mark) petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court this week, asking the Justices to review a decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit that held Home Chef had not proven consumers were likely to confuse their marks with Grubhub and Takeaway.com’s logo.

Last term, the U.S. Supreme Court did something strange: the Court unanimously affirmed a circuit decision, which had unanimously affirmed a trial court decision. Little about the law seemed ripe for dispute or change, nevertheless, in Amgen v. Sanofi the Supreme Court spoke. Seven months later, innovators and patent practitioners are still scratching their heads. What impact, if any, does Amgen have? Is there a sign lower courts are interpreting Amgen as signaling a change in American patent law or did it merely ratify what already existed?

The U.S. Supreme Court today denied a petition asking the High Court to clarify patent eligibility jurisprudence under Section 101 since its 2014 ruling in Alice Corp. Pty Ltd. v. CLS Bank Int’l. Realtime Data, LLC asked the Court specifically to address the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit’s (CAFC’s) August 2023 decision holding 211 of its patent claims ineligible as abstract.

The U.S. Supreme Court today denied certiorari in Intel v. Vidal, a case that asked the Court to overturn a U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) ruling concerning the Patent Trial and Appeal Board’s (PTAB’s) so-called Fintiv framework. The CAFC’s March 2023 decision said appellate review of whether the PTAB’s discretionary denial rules for inter partes review (IPR) are “arbitrary and capricious” was precluded by Section 314(d) of the patent statute.

In 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court decided four intellectual property cases. The cases touched all of the major fields of intellectual property—two cases interpreted the federal trademark act (Jack Daniel’s and Abitron), one case involved patent enablement (Amgen), and one case explicated the federal copyright statutes (Goldsmith). The decisions were split along party lines, with two cases finding in favor of intellectual property owners (Jack Daniel’s and Goldsmith) and two cases in favor of the accused infringers (Abitron and Amgen).

The U.S. Supreme Court yesterday denied a petition for writ of certiorari asking the Court to reconsider the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit’s (CAFC’s) June ruling that the petitioner said signals an expanding practice of reversing agency decisions in lieu of remand. In the CAFC’s decision, the court reversed a Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) judgment that affirmed patent claims in part due to the commercial success of MacNeil IP’s WeatherTech vehicle floor tray. The CAFC also affirmed a PTAB ruling that invalidated three claims of one of MacNeil’s patents in its battle with Yita LLC, a Seattle-based auto parts company.

On November 20, the U.S. Supreme Court denied a petition for writ of certiorari filed in Tata Consultancy Services Ltd. v. Epic Systems Corp. The denial leaves in place an appellate court decision awarding $280 million for unjust enrichment and punitive damages in a trade secret misappropriation case where the plaintiff suffered no economic harm and the defendant gained no actual benefit from the misappropriated information.

On Monday, the United States Supreme Court denied inventor Jeffrey Killian’s petition for a rehearing in his case asking the Court to provide clear guidance on – or else throw out – the Alice/Mayo test for patent eligibility. The Supreme Court denied Killian’s original petition in early October, but Killian filed a request for rehearing several weeks later. Killian first filed a petition for writ of certiorari to the Supreme Court in April, after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) affirmed the Patent Trial and Appeal Board’s (PTAB)’s ruling rejecting claims of his U.S. Patent Application No. 14/450,042 under Section 101.

The U.S. Supreme Court today denied a petition that asked it to consider whether the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit’s (CAFC’s) “construction of petitioner’s patent claim was unforeseeable and unjustifiable under the circuit’s prior decisions,” thereby constituting a judicial taking of property in violation of the Fifth Amendment’s Takings Clause. The petition was an appeal from the CAFC’s April decision affirming a district court’s judgment that AT&T Mobility LLC did not infringe an inventor’s wireless communications technology patent but also holding that AT&T had forfeited its chance to prove the patent invalid on appeal.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) responded last week to a petition for certiorari that is asking the Supreme Court to overturn a U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) decision that said appellate review of whether the Patent Trial and Appeal Board’s (PTAB’s) discretionary denial rules for inter partes review (IPR) are “arbitrary and capricious” is precluded by Section 314(d) of the patent statute.

Just a few weeks after Google waived its right to respond, the Supreme Court denied a petition challenging a U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) decision that held a Texas district court erred in ruling against the search engine and tech behemoth. The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas found the inventors of a method for protecting computers from malware—Alfonso Cioffi and Allen Rozman (the patent is now assigned to Melanie, Megan and Morgan Rozman)—had proven that Google’s Chrome web browser infringed their reissue patents RE43,500, RE43,528, and RE43,529 and that the claims were not invalid. After a first time at the Federal Circuit in which the case was remanded to the district court, a jury awarded Cioffi, et. al. $20 million in past damages and the district court in post-trial review rejected Google’s “original patent defense.”

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday denied certiorari to HIP, Inc. in a case that asked the Court to review the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit’s (CAFC’s) standard for determining joint inventorship. The petition, filed in August, asked the Court to resolve what it called “an indisputable conflict between the express language of Section 116(a) of Title 35, informed by the legislative history of its 1984 amendments, and requirements the Federal Circuit has imposed on the joint inventions statute since the 1984 amendments.”

Oral arguments were held yesterday in Vidal v. Elster, with most observers concluding that the justices are unlikely to grant trademark applicant Steve Elster’s bid to register the mark TRUMP TOO SMALL for t-shirts. Unlike the Court’s recent prominent trademark decisions in Matal v. Tam and Iancu v. Brunetti, there seemed to be little controversy on the part of the justices in Vidal v. Elster over whether the First Amendment is implicated here. Below is a roundup of comments from trademark practitioners on what they thought stood out during the oral arguments.

The U.S. Supreme Court heard oral argument this morning in Vidal v. Elster, the latest in a line of recent cases probing the intersection of the First Amendment and trademark law, following 2017’s Matal v. Tam, 2019’s Iancu v. Brunetti, and this year’s Jack Daniel’s v. VIP Products.  As in Tam and Brunetti, the Justices are being asked in Elster to review the constitutionality of a restriction on federal trademark registrations—this time, the prohibition under Section 1052(c) of the Lanham Act on the registration of living persons’ names without their consent, sometimes called the “Name Clause.”

Yesterday, Google waived its right to respond to a petition for writ of certiorari to the U.S. Supreme Court filed by the inventors of a method for protecting computers from malware. The inventors, Alfonso Cioffi and Allen Rozman (the patent is now assigned to Melanie, Megan and Morgan Rozman), are appealing a U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) decision that reversed a district court ruling and $20 million verdict for the inventors. The CAFC held that the Texas district court erred in ruling that four claims across the three patents were not invalid and agreed with Google’s argument that the claims were invalid under the “original patent requirement” because they contained reissue claims not disclosed in the original patent.