Attorney:
Grace Kim
January 23, 2023
Update by Kasumi Kanetaka & Grace Kim
Last month, the Federal Circuit issued a non-precedential decision affirming the PTAB’s holdings in two final written decisions. P Tech, LLC (herein “P Tech”) appealed the PTAB decisions holding that claims 1 and 4 of U.S. Patent 9,192,395 (herein “’395 patent”) and claims 1-20 of U.S. Patent 9,149,281 (herein “’281 patent”) are unpatentable because they would have been obvious over the cited prior art, U.S. Patent 6,331,181 (herein “Tierney”) in view of U.S. Patent 5,518,163 (herein “Hooven”).P Tech, LLC, v. Intuitive Surgical, Inc., No. 22-1102, No. 22-1115 (December 15, 2022)<... Read more
Attorney:
Grace Kim
December 14, 2022
Update by Grace Kim and Chris Tuinenga
Colgate-Palmolive Co. appealed the Examiner’s rejection of U.S. Application No. 15/539,725 (filed June 26, 2017) as indefinite under 35 U.S.C. §112(b) and obvious under §103 in light of U.S. Application No. 2007/0025928 A1 (published February 1, 2007), “Glandorf.” The PTAB reversed the Examiner’s rejections under §112(b) and several of the Examiner’s rejections based on the Glandorf reference but affirmed an obviousness-type double patenting rejection over U.S. Patent No. 10,350,151 B2 (issued July 16, 2019) to Qiao in view of Glandorf. The Board quickly dispatched the Examiner’s indefiniteness rejection based on the claims’ express limitation that the complex must have a 20:1 phosphorous to zinc mole ratio before focusing on the obviousness rejections.<... Read more
Attorney:
Marina I. Miller, Ph.D.
October 26, 2022
Mylan Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (“Mylan”) appealed from the final written decision of the USPTO Patent Trial and Appeal Board (the “Board”) holding that Mylan failed to show that claims 1–4, 17, 19, and 21–23 of U.S. Patent 7,326,708 (the “’708 patent”) were anticipated or would have been obvious over the cited prior art.<... Read more
Attorney:
Richard D. Kelly
October 5, 2022
The Supreme has relisted the petition for certiorari in Juno Therapeutics, Inc. v. Kite Pharma, Inc., 21-1566 where Juno petitioned for review of the Federal Circuit’s decision reported at 10 F.4th 1330 (2021) reversing the decision of the lower court finding U.S.P. 7,446,190 to not be invalid for lack of written description or enablement and awarding damages of over $1.2 billion. While the relisting of a certiorari petition does not guarantee cert will be granted, statically since 2016 between about 30 and 40% of relisted petitions have been granted. The SCOTUS blog has detailed analysis here. Considering that the overall grant rate for petitions is only about 4% this indicates that the Juno petition has a much greater than normal possibility of being granted.<... Read more
Attorney:
Marina I. Miller, Ph.D.
October 5, 2022
Integrated Technology Solutions, LLC (“ITS”) alleged that products manufactured and distributed by iRacing.com Motorsport Simulations, LLC ("iRacing") infringed on U.S. Patent 10,046,241. iRacing moved to dismiss, arguing that the ‘241 patent was invalid under 35 U.S.C Section 101, as construed by Alice Corp. Pty. Ltd. v. CLS Bank Int'l., 573 U.S. 208 (2014), and its progeny, because the asserted claims were directed to an abstract idea and were patent-ineligible. The U.S. District Court, D. Massachusetts (“the Court”) found that the claims at issue were directed at patent-ineligible concepts, and that the elements of each claim did not transform the claim into patent-eligible application, and granted the motion to dismiss. <... Read more
Attorney:
Richard D. Kelly
October 3, 2022
Just two days after the Federal Circuit denied a stay of its mandate in Novartis v. HEC Pharm Co., Ltd., the Supreme Court granted a stay of the mandate pending a further order of the Court and requiring HEC to file a response to the Novartis stay request.<... Read more
Attorney:
Marina I. Miller, Ph.D.
September 6, 2022
Kamstrup A/S appealed a final written decision of the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (“the Board”). The Board found claims 1–15 of Kamstrup’s U.S. Patent No. 8,806,957 unpatentable as obvious or anticipated. On appeal, Kamstrup challenged the Board’s claim constructions. In addition, Kamstrup challenged the Board’s anticipation and obviousness determinations largely on the basis that the Board erred in rejecting Kamstrup’s claim construction arguments.<... Read more
Attorney:
Richard D. Kelly
August 18, 2022
On August 11, 2022, the Federal Circuit issued its opinion in the remand of Hologic, Inc. v Minerva Surgical, Inc. from the Supreme Court’s decision limiting the application of assignor estoppel to where the assignor is taking in litigation a position inconsistent with his prior representations in assigning the patent. In this case the issue was whether the issued claims are materially broader than the claims in the assigned application, Minerva Surgical, Inc. v. Hologic, Inc., 141 S. Ct. 2298, 2302, 2309 (2021). The Supreme Court in Minerva refused to discard the concept of assignor estoppel but instead held that the concept comes with limits and “reaches only as far as the equitable principle long understood to lie at its core.” The Supreme Court held that assignor estoppel “applies only when an inventor says one thing (explicitly or implicitly) in assigning a patent and the opposite in litigating against the patent’s owner.” Id. at 2304. Stated differently, where the assignor has not any explicit or implicit representations which conflict with an invalidity defense.<... Read more
August 16, 2022
In my first post about Pavo Solutions v. Kingston Technology a few weeks ago, I noted that the Federal Circuit rewrote claim language in the asserted patent by changing the claim element "for pivoting" from case to cover. The claim element in question read as follows:<... Read more
Attorney:
Richard D. Kelly
August 9, 2022
On July 11, Teva filed its petition for certiorari from the Federal Circuit’s second decision in its “skinny label” litigation with GSK, 7 F.4th 1320 (Fed, Cir. 2022). The petition makes many of the same arguments that Teva made before the Federal Circuit but the inconsistency of the Federal Circuit’s decision in GSK with three prior decisions standout. Its yet another example of the Federal Circuit’s lack of discipline in following its own precedent. While Teva rightly complains that the decision creates uncertainty around the skinny label provisions of 21 U.S.C. § 355(j)(2)(A)(viii), the real uncertainty is created by the Federal Circuit’s unfortunate habit of ignoring its own precedent upon which parties rely in making decisions.<... Read more