Posts Tagged: "rejections"

Whether the Citron report is intentionally wrong for the purpose of causing PolarityTE stock to tumble, which it has, or whether it is recklessly wrong, or just ignorant is impossible to tell. But what Citron says can without question be characterized as absolutely incorrect… Citron says that the non-final rejection was made known to PolarityTE on March 31, 2017, which they find to be conclusive proof of fraud because PolarityTE closed a transaction with shareholders on April 7, 2017. The problem, however, is the non-final rejection was mailed by the USPTO and sent to the law firm representing PolarityTE on April 7, 2017… Citron also claims that PolarityTE has engaged in fraud because they received a final rejection from the patent examiner and did not notify shareholders. Again, only those who are completely unfamiliar with patent practice and procedure could possibly make such an erroneous claim. A final rejection is anything but final in the everyday meaning of the word.

USAA alleges that Wells Fargo Mobile Deposit remote deposit capture system, which was released years after either of USAA’s remote deposit services were first offered, infringe upon the asserted patents. Wells Fargo Mobile Deposit has been downloaded more than 10 million times from the Google Play Store alone and by February 2018, Wells Fargo had 21 million users who were actively using a mobile banking account. Wells Fargo mobile check deposit system involves the use of alignment guides and feedback indicators which are designed to assist customers in orienting the camera, features covered by the USAA patents. Although USAA approached Wells Fargo last August to discuss the licensing of USAA’s remote deposit capture patents, Wells Fargo allegedly continues to practice the technologies without any compensation to USAA. Along with counts for infringement of each patent asserted, USAA is also seeking a finding of willful infringement to enhance the actual damages by three times.

Unlike certain rejections one faces in life, a rejection from a patent examiner is never the end of the story, and definitely not final – even when the rejection is called a final rejection all hope is not lost and there are things that can be done to continue to attempt to persuade and ultimately convince the patent examiner you are entitled to a patent… Generally speaking, what you will want to do after you get a final rejection will not be the type of thing you will have the right to do. In that likely situation, the most common thing to do is file what is called a Request for Continued Examination (RCE), which is allowed under 37 CFR 1.114. An applicant request continued examination of an application at any time after prosecution in the application is closed.

The refusal to grant claims because the subject matter as claimed is considered unpatentable is called a “rejection.” The term “rejected” is used by the patent examiner when the substance of the patent claims being sought are deemed to be unallowable under 35 U.S.C. 101, 102, 103 and/or 112. If the form of the claim (as distinguished from its substance) is improper, an “objection” is made. An example of a matter of form as to which objection is made is dependency of a claim on a previously rejected claim. You can also get an objection where claims have not been properly grouped together in violation of 37 CFR 75(g).

Several questions every patent attorney should be asking before responding to an Alice rejection are: (1) How many Alice rejections has the examiner issued? (2) What does he or she consider to be the sticking points of the decision? (3) How many applications that received an Alice rejection were eventually allowed? Once an attorney has the answers to these questions in hand, the path to success in responding to an Alice rejection is considerably clearer.

While Alice rejections can be found all over the USPTO, roughly two-thirds of them are found in TC 3600. Only TC 2900 has not had any Alice rejections. Looking deeper into the 3620s, 3680s, and 3690s, the reach of Alice becomes apparent. Using Juristat’s data, we counted all rejections in these art units since June 19, 2014, the date Alice was decided. We then calculated the percentage of those rejections that cited Alice, focusing only on examiners that have issued at least ten rejections since the Alice decision. As shown in Figure 3, roughly three-quarters of all rejections in these art units are Alice rejections, with several examiners having a 100% Alice rejection rate.

Sadly, this is not an isolated case. I’ve seen similar rejections in a diverse (and utterly random) number of art areas and technologies ranging from predictive computer algorithms, to voice recognition technology, to methods for user-customization of advertising received on a device. While some of the rejected claims were arguably directed to an abstract idea, only a small minority had any apparent connection to “organizing human activity” as that phrase has been used in the case law.