IP Law Bulletin

The Federal Circuit recently revisited a question first answered earlier this year in Versata Dev. Grp., Inc. v. SAP Am., Inc., 793 F.3d 1306 (Fed. Cir. 2015) (Versata II): When is a patent eligible for Covered-Business Method Review (CBM review) under AIA §18?

Earlier last month, Director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Michelle Lee announced the Enhanced Patent Quality Initiative to increase the clarity of issued patents so as to ensure that patent holders and potential users are better informed of the full scope of the patents’ rights when making important business decisions. The initial programs under this initiative will include:

The America Invents Act (AIA) introduced several changes to inventor oath/declaration practice that took effect in 2012.  One such change is the ability to incorporate an inventor’s required declaration statements into an assignment document, thereby reducing the number of documents that must be executed by an inventor in connection with filing a patent application.  If an applicant elects to go this route, a single combined declaration and assignment document can be recorded at the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and a copy will be automatically placed in the application’s file wrapper.  It appears to be the case, however, that this automatic copying by the USPTO of the combined declaration and assignment into the file wrapper for an application triggers a Notice of Incomplete Reply if there is an outstanding Notice to File Missing Parts or Notice to File Corrected Application Papers that identifies a deficiency in addition to the lack of an oath/declaration—despite the fact that the applicant has not made any reply to such a notice.

Last week the Federal Circuit denied Sequenom’s petition for rehearing en banc to review patent eligibility of their cell-free fetal DNA patent, U.S. Pat. No 6,258,540 (the ’540 Patent).  The District Court found the ’540 Patent invalid under 35 U.S.C. § 101 for being directed to ineligible subject matter under the U.S. Supreme Court precedent in Mayo v. Prometheus Laboratories, 132 S. Ct. 1298 (2012). The Federal Circuit affirmed and Sequenom filed the petition for rehearing en banc.

Now that our readers have had their fill of turkey and all the fixings, they can gorge on an abundance of patent petitions data. Earlier this year, Director of the USPTO Michelle Lee announced a new public, user-friendly tool to obtain information about the abundance and success rate of petitions of every nature. The information generally includes:

• The average number of days a petition is pending before a decision is made;

• The grant rate for a petition; and

• The office within the USPTO that makes the decision on the petition.

Earlier this fall the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) announced the “Streamlined, Expedited Patent Appeal Pilot for Small Entities” program (the Streamlined, Expedited program), which allows small and micro entities to expedite a single ex parte patent appeal pending before the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (Board). In order to take advantage of this program, a patent applicant must:

• Be a small or micro entity appellant;

• Have only a single ex parte patent appeal pending before the Board as of September 18, 2015;

• Have no claim involved in the appeal that can be subject to a rejection under 35 U.S.C. § 112;

• For each ground of rejection that is applied to more than one claim, select a single claim as representative and only discuss that claim in the appeal for that ground;

• Agree to waive any requested oral hearing; and

• Acknowledge that any oral hearing fees paid in connection with the appeal will not be refunded.

In Scholz v. Goudreau, No. 13-CV-10951, 2015 WL 5554012 (D. Mass. Sept. 21, 2015) rock legends are before the District of Massachusetts grappling, in part, over a familiar band’s legacy.

After guitarist Barry Goudreau left the band BOSTON in 1981, he filed a suit against Thomas Scholz—one of the band’s founders—as well as BOSTON’s other members, in order to ascertain the parties’ rights and obligations going forward.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) makes it illegal to circumvent technological measures used to prevent unauthorized access to copyrighted works.  Certain activities and classes of works, however, are exempted from this prohibition.  The exempted classes of works are determined by the U.S. Copyright Office every three years and remain in effect for the ensuing three-year period. 

Summary: While the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act (AIA) brought sweeping changes to the United States patent system, including moving to a first-to-file system and implementing and modifying a number of post-grant proceeding options, one less heralded change is the expansion of the third party preissuance submission process, by which a third party can submit prior art references in a pending U.S. patent application for consideration by the examiner. The revised preissuance submission process is significantly more robust and accessible than its pre-AIA counterpart. Key features of the process such as low cost, anonymity, and preclusion from estoppels make it a potentially attractive tool for challenging pending applications. However, a third party’s participation in the patent prosecution process is still limited and the submitted references may even inadvertently strengthen any patent that issues from the application in which the submission is filed. Accordingly, third parties should carefully consider the limitations and risks associated with the process before filing a preissuance submission.

Over the summer we analyzed a decision by the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit that denied Amazon.com, Inc.’s (Amazon) motion for summary judgment as to watchmaker Multi Time Machine, Inc.’s (MTM) claims that Amazon’s use of MTM’s trademarks as keywords at amazon.com was infringing. The Ninth Circuit has now taken the unusual step of revisiting and vacating its July decision, upholding the federal district court’s grant of summary judgment in favor of Amazon.