Scott W. Doyle Image

Scott W. Doyle

is the head of Fried Frank‘s Intellectual Property Litigation Group and is resident in the Firm’s Washington, DC office.

Mr. Doyle focuses primarily on patent and intellectual property infringement actions in the federal courts and Section 337 actions at the International Trade Commission, where he once worked in the General Counsel’s office. He also has extensive experience in arbitrations and mediations involving patent and intellectual property issues. A trained electrical engineer and registered patent attorney, he has litigated cases involving a wide range of technologies including telecommunications, Internet, digital cameras, computer hardware and software, automotive, photolithography machines, chemical compositions, medical devices, semiconductor, and biotechnology. Mr. Doyle has also developed extensive experience in Inter Partes Review at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (“PTAB”) and other PTO patent review proceedings. Chambers USA, Benchmark Litigation, and several other legal directories, have named Mr. Doyle one of the leading individuals in Intellectual Property.

Recent Articles by Scott W. Doyle

No Bridge Over the Troubled Waters of Section 101

The waters surrounding Section 101 of the Patent Act are as muddied as they come. The statute sets forth only in broad strokes what inventions are patentable, leaving it to the courts to create an implied exception to patentability for laws of nature, natural phenomena, and abstract ideas. It has been difficult for lower courts to determine whether an invention falls within one of these excluded categories, and the U.S. Supreme Court has refused to provide a definition of what constitutes an “abstract idea.” Nonetheless, the Court in recent years has laid several foundation stones in Bilski, Mayo, Myriad and Alice for a bridge over these troubled waters. Trying to build upon these, the Federal Circuit issued two recent opinions dealing with Section 101: Enfish, LLC v. Microsoft Corporation and In re: TLI Communications LLC Patent Litigation. However, these decisions only create more confusion and cannot provide a safe means of passage over the turbulent waters of patent eligibility.