The Patent Trial and Appeal Board’s construction of a key claim term in a patent directed to a method for fabricating a self-aligned contact hole in a semiconductor circuit was overbroad in light of the actual claim language and specification, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has held. Because a prior art…

In paragraph 54 of its judgment of 12 July 2017, the UK Supreme Court wrote that “[…] notwithstanding what Lord Diplock said in Catnic [1982] RPC 183, 242, a problem of infringement is best approached by addressing two issues, each of which is to be considered through the eyes of the notional addressee of the…

Decisions by the Patent Trial and Appeal Board in three interference proceedings between Stanford University and the Chinese University of Hong Kong (“CUHK”)—in which the Board found that methods of testing for fetal aneuploidies in DNA samples drawn from maternal blood were unpatentable for lack of written description—have been vacated by the U.S. Court of…

The Patent Trial and Appeal Board did not err in instituting Covered Business Method (“CBM”) review and finding several claims of a financing method patent owned by Credit Acceptance Corporation (“CAC”) to be directed to a patent-ineligible abstract idea, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has ruled. The Board correctly rejected CAC’s…

By Annsley Merelle Ward On 22 May 2107, the US Supreme Court unanimously put limits on where patentees can commence patent infringement proceedings in the US.  In the case, TC Heartland challenged Kraft Heinz’s decision to commence patent infringement proceedings against it in Delaware, arguing that the case should be transferred to its home court in Indiana….

The Patent Trial and Appeal Board erroneously construed the term “aseptic” in an inter partes review (IPR) of a patent for a method of aseptically bottling sterilized food, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has held. The Board erred in construing the term as incorporating “any applicable United States FDA standard” rather…

To the extent that the Patent Trial and Appeal Board did not provide an explanation for its obviousness rejection of 13 claims of a Securus patent on a system and method for reviewing monitored conversations and identifying items of interest, the ruling was vacated and remanded by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal…

The federal district court in Tyler, Texas, correctly denied Core Wireless Licensing S.A.R.L.’s (“Core Wireless’s”) motion for judgment as a matter of law that Apple infringed a claim of a Core Wireless patent directed to a means for sending packet data from a mobile station such as a cellular telephone to a cellular system or…

In an inter partes review (IPR) proceeding challenging a SimpleAir patent that described a method of transmitting data to remote computing devices, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board did not err in concluding that IPR petitioner Google failed to establish that a combination of prior art references rendered the challenged claims unpatentably obvious, the U.S….

Dr. Simon Klopschinski rospatt osten pross – Intellectual Property Rechtsanwälte In the international investment arbitration of Eli Lilly v. Canada the arbitral tribunal rendered on March 16, 2017 the first final award ever on patents and international investment law, thereby creating a completely new forum for litigating patents (ICSID Case No.: UNCT/14/2). The arbitral tribunal…