Posts Tagged: "Patent Trial and Appeal Board"

After Hyatt v. Hirshfeld, it Might Be Time to Pay Attention to Prosecution Laches

Gilbert Hyatt was one of many applicants who filed many patent applications shortly before the June 8, 1995 transition point, where patent terms transitioned from being defined based on 17 years from issuance to 20 years from filing. However, he was quite unique in that he was an independent inventor who filed 400 patent applications before this transition point. The vast majority of these applications are still pending – decades after filing. Hyatt asserts that the long pendency is due to bad-faith behavior of the USPTO, while the USPTO asserts that the extended pendency is due to inaction by Hyatt and the complexity of the applications.

Patent Litigation Likely to Rise with More Litigation Financing Opportunities

From increasing damage awards into the billions of dollars, to a new hot patent court for plaintiffs in West Texas, to increased financing available from litigation funders to growth in competitor lawsuits with large entities looking to monetize their own portfolios, there is a changing face of patent litigation as we head into a post-pandemic world.

Patent Filings Roundup: Funded-NPE Semiconductor Shotgun Petition Backfires; APJ Bucks Board on Fintiv; IP Edge Files Dozens

Happy Memorial Day week. It was a light week at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board with 20 filings – 18 inter partes reviews (IPRs) and two post grant reviews (PGRs) – but another heavy one for patent filings in district court (96 complaints), driven primarily by a deluge of new IP Edge complaints (I didn’t count it out, but it looks like more than 50) and a single new massive Humira/Abbvie patent-thicket complaint. The Board issued another five or so Fintiv denials, including one over an International Trade Commission (ITC) date, and only a handful of merits denials; it includes one, listed below, where the Board found merit to some minority of the challenged grounds but nonetheless denied after SAS Institute, Inc. v. Iancu for efficiency. The Magnetar Capital-backed Neodron made it to Markman and settled and then filed another round of enforcement actions against new defendants; and there appears to be burgeoning disagreement at the Board itself in just how precedential the Fintiv analyses are, and whether the Board is overreaching its discretion and misreading its own precedent.

CAFC Finds Certain Baxter Telepharmacy Claims Obvious, Reversing PTAB

On May 28, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) reversed a decision of the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (Board), holding certain claims of U.S. Patent No. 8,554,579 (the ‘579 patent) are invalid as obvious under 35 U.S.C. §103. Baxter Corporation Englewood (Baxter) is the owner of the ‘579 patent, which discloses “[s]ystems for preparing patient-specific doses and a method for telepharmacy in which data captured while following [a protocol associated with each received drug order and specifying a set of steps to fill the drug order] are provided to a remote site for review and approval by a pharmacist.”

Patent Filings Roundup: In Reversal, COVID Renders W.D. TX Trial Dates Uncertain for Fintiv; Semiconductor NPE Suits and PTAB Challenges on a Roll; Board Issues Order Barring Future Filings

A quiet week resulted in 28 petitions at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB), mostly related to preexisting suits, though with a perhaps surprising number of semiconductor patents challenged, and three Qualcomm challenges to Monterey Research (i.e., Vector Capital) patents were all instituted; in general, the district courts had a light week with 55 patent filings, many complaints adding new defendants for old campaigns. Some of the recently filed complaints in the longest-running Blitzsafe campaign against were dismissed without prejudice against automotive OEMs; and probably most notable, in a Fintiv denial, a panel cited the global pandemic and the uncertainty of trial schedules in weighing that factor neutrally (while still exercising their discretion for other reasons), as discussed below. Sonos hit back with inter partes reviews (IPRs) against Google patents in their ongoing dispute.