Posts Tagged: "intellectual property"

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) today issued a Request for Comments (RFC) that will be published in the Federal Register tomorrow seeking input from the public on how to better incentivize commercialization of innovation, particularly in green and critical or emerging technologies. According to the RFC, the comments received “will be used to evaluate possibilities for amplifying the impact of our current work, and to explore new ways to support the transfer of innovation to the marketplace.”

Efforts by high-tech companies to undermine both the Patent Eligibility Restoration Act of 2023 and the Promoting and Respecting Economically Vital American Innovation Leadership (PREVAIL) Act ramped up this week, with a joint letter sent to the Senate Judiciary Committee by a number of tech industry organizations on Monday and a campaign launched by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) yesterday.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) issued a brief opinion authored by Judge Chen today that rejected Daedalus Blue LLC’s appeal of a Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) decision finding certain claims of its patent on a data management system unpatentable. The PTAB held that U.S. Patent No. 8,671,132 was unpatentable as obvious over combinations of three prior art references: “Gelb”, “Tivoli”, and “Callaghan.” Daedalus in part argued on appeal that the Board incorrectly found that Gelb is analogous art because Gelb “is not reasonably pertinent to the problems identified in the ’132 patent.”

Artificial Intelligence (AI) stands at the forefront of innovation, transforming industries and shaping the future of global economies. Although AI innovators understand the value of intellectual property (IP) protection for their innovations, they often don’t know how to secure the right kind of IP protection for their innovations. Employing a process for systematically mining AI innovations to create a map of those innovations is one option for identifying the most suitable form(s) of IP protection to obtain, based on the innovation and the business model within which that innovation will be commercially deployed.

On March 11, U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Director Kathi Vidal issued an order on rehearing that upheld the attorney’s fee award levied against petitioner OpenSky Industries over its abuse of process during inter partes review (IPR) proceedings at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB). Although Director Vidal’s order delayed the date by which OpenSky must pay, the ruling nixed OpenSky’s challenges to the more than $400,000 attorney’s fee award in favor of patent owner VLSI.

In an opposition brief filed Monday, The New York Times Company (The Times) told a New York district court that OpenAI’s late February claim that The Times “paid someone to hack OpenAI’s products” in order to prove OpenAI infringed its copyrights amounts to little more than “grandstanding.” In late December 2023, the Times became the latest of many complainants to accuse OpenAI’s Large Language Model, ChatGPT, as well as Microsoft’s GPT-4-powered Bing Chat, of widespread copyright infringement. The Times alleged that Microsoft and OpenAI reproduce Times content verbatim and also often attribute false information to the Times. The Times’ opposition brief filed yesterday responds to OpenAI’s recent motion to dismiss, which alleged that The Times paid someone to target and exploit “a bug (which OpenAI has committed to addressing) by using deceptive prompts that blatantly violate OpenAI’s terms of use.”

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) announced Monday that it has created an Office of Public Engagement (OPE) “to advance the agency’s mission of increasing participation in the innovation ecosystem by strengthening outreach and support to American communities.” The OPE will be on par with the Patents and Trademarks units and will consolidate a number of existing offices into one, including the four USPTO Regional Offices.

In what has to be the unkindest cut of all, those expected to benefit from the proposed misuse of march-in rights so the government can impose drug price controls say they don’t support it either. The proponents promoting this hot house theory have seen it denounced by those who created the Bayh-Dole Act as being unauthorized under their law and seen evidence they can’t refute that it would have little impact on drug prices but would devastate small business entrepreneurs in all fields of federally supported research and development. And now they’ve lost the generic drug industry.

The Judicial Council of the Federal Circuit told the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on Friday that it should dismiss Judge Pauline Newman’s remaining challenges to the Council’s decision to suspend Newman indefinitely from the court because all of Newman’s claims “fail as a matter of law.” Most recently, on February 12, the District of Columbia court denied a motion for preliminary injunction filed by Judge Newman. Despite acknowledging that all of the recent complaints against Newman’s mental fitness continue to be unsubstantiated, the D.C. district court determined that most of Judge Newman’s requested relief was foreclosed by legal precedent limiting constitutional challenges to the Judicial Conduct and Disability (JC&D) Act. However, the court said it maintains jurisdiction over three of the 11 counts, and part of another, brought by Newman.

This week in Other Barks and Bites: Amazon and Huawei resolve their patent dispute by closing a global patent agreement; the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) arrests a Chinese citizen accused of stealing proprietary information from Google, and the Bank of America announces patent growth with focus on AI.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) on Thursday, March 7, vacated a decision of the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) that had held unpatentable certain claims to CoolIT Systems, Inc.’s patent. U.S. Patent 9,057,567 is titled “Fluid Heat Exchange Systems” and is directed to a system for fluid heat transfer to cool electronic devices. On appeal to the CAFC, CoolIT argued that the PTAB erred in construing one of the claim terms, “matingly engaged” and that even under the PTAB’s construction, the asserted prior art did not meet the matingly engaged limitation.

As of today, the world’s major platforms—Apple, Alphabet, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft and ByteDance—must be in full compliance with the European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), an EU regulation intended to level the playing field in the digital marketplace. Signed into law in September 2022, the DMA imposed a complex regulatory framework upon the major Internet services platforms that are deemed to be “gatekeepers” (i.e. have a market capitalization of at least €75 billion [$83 billion USD]) due to their dominant market position. These gatekeepers each market at least one “core platform service” (CPS) that connects large numbers of users and business interests.

This week was an above-average one for patent filings in both the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) and in district courts. The PTAB had two new post grant review (PGR) petitions and 39 new inter partes review (IPR) petitions, for a total of 41 new filings. And the district court also had heightened activity with 75 new filings.

On February 8, 2024, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued a precedential decision in Weber, Inc. v. Provisur Technologies, Inc., reversing the finding of the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) that certain operating manuals with limited dissemination and confidentiality restrictions did not qualify as prior art. The Federal Circuit’s decision concluded that the Board misapplied the analysis for meeting the public accessibility standard for a printed publication to qualify as prior art.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) issued a precedential decision today reversing the Western District of Texas district court’s indefiniteness analysis and explaining that it improperly found a contradiction between two claim limitations to arrive at its indefiniteness holding. Amperex Technology Limited filed an action seeking declaratory judgment of noninfringement and challenged the validity of certain claims of Maxell, Ltd.’s U.S. Patent No. 9,077,035 for a rechargeable lithium battery and Maxell asserted infringement of the patent in a separate action. The two actions were consolidated in the Western District of Texas and the court ultimately held that two of the “wherein” clauses of the sole independent claim 1 of the ‘035 patent contradicted one another.