As the Iancu era at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office comes to a close, one of the USPTO’s initiatives has focused on promoting diversity in patenting. The newly established National Council on Expanding American Innovation, and the associated USPTO request for comments on a national strategy for expanding innovation, focus on having under-represented groups…
Late last August, the UK Supreme Court issued a ruling in Unwired Planet permitting UK courts to assert jurisdiction over worldwide rate-setting in standard-essential patent (SEP) disputes. I predicted that this would lead to widespread chaos, with companies picking different jurisdictions and attempting to obtain a better rate in one forum than the other. I…
The USPTO is considering whether to enshrine discretionary denial of inter partes review cases into regulation. Last week, comments were due on the most recent portion of this process. (CCIA’s comments criticizing the current General Plastic, Valve, NHK Spring, and Fintiv precedential opinions, and explaining why they should not be converted into rules, can be…
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s precedential opinions on discretionary denial are the subject of significant attention—a withdrawn attempt by the Trump Administration to codify discretionary denial as a rule, a request for comments on rulemaking by the Office, and a challenge to the practice of discretionary denial as illegal under the Administrative Procedure Act.…
On Monday, the PTAB made clear that the ultimate outcome of the Fintiv rule championed by Director Iancu is the elimination of inter partes review (IPR) as a viable alternative to challenging patents in litigation. RAI sued Philip Morris on April 9th, 2020. Less than a month later, on May 8th, 2020, Philip Morris filed…
There are signs that, despite Judge Albright’s best efforts, the rest of the world might not support turning the Western District of Texas into another NPE haven like the Eastern District in its glory days. After Judge Albright’s efforts to make sure Waco was “open for business for patent cases”, NPEs flocked to the Waco…
This week, the Supreme Court granted certiorari in a set of related cases between Arthrex and Smith & Nephew, as well as the federal government. The cases revolve around one fundamental question: are judges of the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) principal officers of the United States? That question controls the constitutionality of their…
Judge Gilstrap of the infamously NPE-friendly Eastern District of Texas used to handle one out of every four patent cases in the entire United States. The Eastern District as a whole handled more than 40% of all patent cases nationally, despite only having about 1% of the nation’s population. After the Supreme Court’s 2017 decision…
This article was written by guest author Sam Howard, a 3L at Boston University School of Law and the winner of the 2019-2020 Patent Progress Writing Competition. The article is a shortened version of his full contest entry, which will be published in the Boston University Journal of Science and Technology Law in 2021, and…
Last week, the UK Supreme Court ruled that it was legally permissible for UK courts to set worldwide license rates for patents that are subject to fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory license (FRAND) obligations. The decision is likely to have worldwide ramifications—and create worldwide chaos in SEP licensing.
