Posts Tagged: "Multiple Petitions"

USPTO Says Serial and Parallel PTAB Petitions Have Declined

The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has released an update to its study on multiple Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) petitions that it says demonstrates that serial and parallel petition practice at the PTAB has been decreasing since 2016, when the Office first issued guidance on the subject. Serial petitions are characterized as petitions filed to challenge the same patent more than 90 days after the initial petition, while parallel petitions are those filed 90 days or fewer apart. The report determined the total number of challenges in each fiscal year by looking at how many times a particular petitioner challenged claims of a particular patent.

Supreme Court Refuses to Take SSL Services v. Cisco, Will Not Answer Question on Multiple Proceedings Rule at PTAB

In its petition for writ, SSL Services argued that the PTAB’s decision to institute the IPR incorrectly denied the application of 35 U.S.C. § 325(d), the statute governing multiple proceedings at the USPTO; giving the USPTO Director authority to reject a proceeding based on substantially similar prior art or arguments already presented to the agency in a validity review. While the PTAB laid out a multi-factor test for applying the multiple proceedings rule in a 2017 precedential decision in General Plastic v. Canon, SSL Services argued that this test is legally incorrect because the factors in that test do not find support in the statute. Further, the PTAB has applied Section 325(d) to bar the institution of IPRs in far less meritorious cases, including multiple cases where the asserted prior art had only been cited in the original prosecution of the patent and not a validity challenge after the patent had issued. This has resulted in a standard for applying Section 325(d) which is unworkable, SSL Services argued.

Supreme Court asked to apply Multiple Proceeding rule to end harassing validity challenges

The Multiple Proceedings rule has become the essence of uncertainty. What exactly does it mean? §325(d) gives the PTO Director the authority to refuse a petition when “the same or substantially the same prior art or arguments” were previously presented. For IPRs like this one to proceed despite numerous prior rulings in various fora upholding a patent’s validity is a travesty. The facts of this case underscore the mischief that can befall a patent owner under the current practice of the PTAB, enabled by the Federal Circuit… I recently wrote, “[t]he fight goes on to invalidate claims until the patent owner loses and the claims are invalidated.” But that is precisely what the § 325(d) Multiple-Proceedings rule was intended to prevent. And this needs to stop.

The Real IPR Gauntlet: What USPTO Statistics Don’t Show

87.2% of patents in the study, per the table, were subjected to just 1 or 2 IPR petitions – so gang tackling is no big deal. But make this simple observation: If a patent is killed in its first IPR, it can’t possibly be considered for a second one. The USPTO keeps their denominator fixed (and too large), which artificially lessens the reported percentage of patents which have large numbers of petitions filed against them. The calculation shouldn’t be 55/4,376 = 1.3% because by the time a patent faces its 7th(!) IPR petition, the universe of eligible-for-challenge patents is much smaller than during the first petition.