Posts Tagged: "prior art"

SCOTUS Denies Petition to Review CAFC Precedent on Justification for Primary Reference Selection

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday, March 18, denied a petition filed by patent owner Jodi A. Schwendimann asking the Court to review a decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) that affirmed a Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) determination that Schwendimann’s patents were obvious. The petition specifically asked the Court to review the CAFC’s holding that Schwendimann’s argument that “justification for selection of a primary reference is a necessary step to guard against hindsight bias for the motivation to combine references” was unsupported by Federal Circuit case law.

After Weber v. Provisur, Confidentiality Provisions May Not Be Sufficient to Protect Your Documents from Being Prior Art

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.

Pfizer Alleges Inconsistencies in Moderna’s Statements to FDA and PTAB

In a recent brief to the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB), Pfizer and BioNTech (Pfizer) told PTAB judges that Moderna’s dismissal of prior art listed in Pfizer’s August 2023 petition for inter partes review (IPR) of Moderna’s patent on mRNA vaccine technology is inconsistent with its declarations to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) during the drug approval process. According to the brief, when Moderna was seeking approval for its COVID-19 vaccines, the company “candidly represented to the FDA that prior studies for related vaccines…supported an expectation of safety and efficacy. But now, faced with invalidating vaccine prior art…Moderna wrongly casts the same vaccine prior art as irrelevant.” The brief referred to this as a “litigation-driven one-eighty.”

Patent Applications Published After the Priority Date of a Challenged Patent Are Not ‘Printed Publications’ for IPRs

Section 311(b) of the America Invents Act (AIA) provides that a patent can be challenged in an inter partes review (IPR) “only on the basis of prior art consisting of patents or printed publications.” A published U.S. patent application that never issued as a patent can be used as the basis for an IPR challenge because it’s printed and it’s a publication, right? Not so fast.

Federal Circuit Affirms Mixed Rulings for Patent Owner Based on ‘Ordinary Meaning’ of Claim Phrase

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) in a precedential decision today affirmed two decisions of the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) that invalidated some claims and upheld others of a patent owned by Personal Genomics Taiwan, Inc. Based on the PTAB’s claim construction, which the CAFC agreed with, the decision held that Pacific Biosciences had failed to prove the prior art taught the limitation of the preamble phrase of claim 1 in one inter partes review, (IPR) but did prove a different prior art reference taught the limitation in the other proceeding.