Posts Tagged: "technology"

Every November, we gather around tables filled with the fruits of hard work and gratitude. It’s a season that reminds us to pause and appreciate not only what we’ve built, but also the unseen effort and foresight that made it possible. In innovation, that same kind of gratitude is found in something often overlooked but profoundly important: Freedom to Operate (FTO). Most founders understand the excitement of being patent pending. But few truly grasp what it means to be free to operate. The two are not the same.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) on Tuesday issued a precedential decision affirming a district court decision that found claims of MediaPointe, Inc.’s patents for internet streaming technology either invalid as indefinite or not infringed. The decision was authored by Judge Taranto. Akamai Technologies, Inc. sued MediaPointe in 2022, seeking a declaratory judgment of non-infringement of MediaPointe’s U.S. Patent No. 8,559,426 and its child, U.S. Patent No. 9,426,195. MediaPointe counterclaimed for infringement of both patents and Akamai counterclaimed for judgment of invalidity of all claims of both patents.

In 1980, the Supreme Court decided Diamond v. Chakrabarty, the seminal Section 101 case holding that non-natural, man-made organisms are patent eligible. The Court’s decision paved the way for substantial investment in the then-nascent biotech industry. Forty-five years later, one would think that there’s little room to debate the patent eligibility of genetically engineered host cells—particularly a host cell that can produce non-native viral plasmids and proteins useful in making life-saving, gene-based medicines. But that debate is front and center in Regenxbio v. Sarepta, a pending appeal at the Federal Circuit that follows more recent Supreme Court and Federal Circuit decisions that have turned Section 101 into a short-cut for bringing patent challenges under Sections 102, 103, and 112.

Welcome to the very first installment of Cool AI Patents of the Month. Each month, we’ll look at some of the more eye-catching and creative ways Artificial Intelligence (AI) is showing up in innovations that themselves wind up represented in patents or patent applications. The goal isn’t to get overly technical, but to highlight technology that’s genuinely cool and thought-provoking — the kind of inventions that make you say, “Wow, that’s clever.”

The World Intellectual Property Organization’s (WIPO’s) new Treaty on Intellectual Property, Genetic Resources and Associated Traditional Knowledge, adopted in May 2024, would impose additional disclosure obligations on patent applicants under the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT). Specifically, it would require disclosure of traditional knowledge and genetic resources even when those details have no bearing on patentability.

Today, Mrs Justice Joanna Smith DBE of the United Kingdom’s High Court of Justice issued a highly awaited ruling in Getty Images (US) Inc. v. Stability AI Ltd., a case which was expected to have major implications in determining liability for generative artificial intelligence (AI) developers under UK intellectual property law. The 205-page decision, which mainly focuses on Getty’s trademark claim while also clarifying important aspects of secondary copyright liability in the AI context, failed to address certain fundamental questions in large part because Getty failed to raise sufficient evidence to proceed with its claim of primary copyright infringement at trial.

On Friday, October 31, Professors Shlomit Yanisky-Ravid, Lawrence Lessig and a number of other professors and researchers filed an amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in support of Dr. Stephen Thaler’s petition for a writ of certiorari in Thaler v. Perlmutter, which is urging the Court to grant certiorari and recognize copyright protection for works generated by artificial intelligence (AI). The brief argued that “excluding AI-generated works from copyright protection threatens the foundations of American creativity, innovation, and economic growth,” warning that the lower court’s interpretation, which requires human authorship, disregards the “spirit of the Copyright Act.”

For decades, inventors, practitioners, and researchers alike have faced the same tradeoff. Free tools surface only the most obvious references, missing decisive prior art. Professional platforms offer depth, but require significant training and demand five-figure subscriptions. The patent system promises to promote innovation by making knowledge accessible. But to fully realize this vision, patent knowledge must be available on tap to everyone who needs it, in whichever form best serves each individual user. Today’s AI technology has unlocked the possibility of universal access to professional-grade patent intelligence.

A New York judge ruled on Monday that OpenAI cannot stop a consolidated, multi-district class action brought against by dozens of authors for direct copyright infringement by the outputs of its large language model (LLM), ChatGPT. OpenAI argued that the plaintiffs had failed to allege substantial similarity between the works and ChatGPT’s outputs, but Judge Sidney Stein of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York said  that “[a] more discerning observer could reasonably conclude that the allegedly infringing outputs are substantially similar to plaintiffs’ copyrighted works.”

Reddit filed a lawsuit yesterday against artificial intelligence (AI) company Perplexity AI and three other defendants for their alleged illegal circumvention of Reddit security measures meant to protect misuse of its content and data. Reddit, which describes itself in the complaint as “one of the largest repositories of human conversation in existence,” likened the actions of Oxylabs UAB, AWMProxy, and SerpApi to those of “would-be bank robbers.” Through their development of tools that bypass both Google’s and Reddit’s anti-scraping measures, and their scraping of Reddit content from Google search results, these defendants, “knowing they cannot get into the bank vault, break into the armored truck carrying the cash instead,” said the complaint.

On October 21, 10x Genomics, Inc. and Prognosys Biosciences, Inc. filed a complaint for patent infringement against Illumina, Inc. in the United States District Court for the District of Delaware, asserting that Illumina’s spatial technology products infringed on patents covering technology for spatial transcriptomics, which allows researchers to study gene activity within a cell’s tissue. U.S. Patent Nos. 11,008,607, 11,549,138, 12,234,505, and 12,297,487 are owned by Prognosys Biosciences and have significant applications in cancer research, neuroscience and immunology.

“Royalty-free” is an appealing notion, especially when applied to the licensing of a patent essential to a standard. This standard is even more compelling to an implementer when every participant in the relevant standards body or proprietary consortia, including preeminent technology companies, has pledged it will grant its essential patents on a royalty free (RF) basis…. But is it the case that “royalty-free” applied to standard-essential patents (SEPs) is FRAND (fair, reasonable and nondiscriminatory), but better? Today’s U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) doesn’t think so.

The $1.5 billion settlement in Bartz v. Anthropic, recently granted preliminary approval, is the largest copyright settlement in American legal history. That’s impressive, but more important, it shows tech companies must play by the same rules as everyone else. Tech companies regularly ask for special treatment, arguing their innovations are too important to be slowed down by existing laws. But when these companies grow big enough to affect billions of people’s lives, those early shortcuts become serious problems.

Given the recent proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI) patent drafting technology, some in the legal services industry are asking whether AI is the patent profession’s “ultimate bad day,”on par with the dinosaurs’ ultimate bad day posited by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Luis Alvarez in 1980. Like the asteroid thought to cause a mass extinction of the dinosaurs, will AI be a formidable impactor that renders patent prosecution an unprofitable practice area in law firms and alternative legal service providers (ALSPs)? Will AI decimate patent prosecution as a viable career?

Taking their cue from the recent Bartz v. Anthropic saga, the authors of a neuroscience book and professors at the State University of New York filed a class action complaint on October 9 with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleging that Apple Inc. committed mass copyright infringement by using pirated books to train its artificial intelligence systems. Plaintiffs Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen Macknik claimed that Apple built its Apple Intelligence platform, including its OpenELM and Foundation Models, by making unauthorized copies of copyrighted works without permission or compensation.