Last week, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (“Board”) issued two decisions reversing final rejections under 35 U.S.C. § 101. Rather than performing an in-depth analysis of the claimed subject matter, the Board based these reversals on an incomplete subject matter eligibility analysis by the examiner. These appeals originated from Art Unit 3690, which focuses … Continue Reading
On January 25, 2017, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board issued an order dismissing three separate Inter Partes Review (IPR) petitions based on the doctrine of sovereign immunity. The doctrine of sovereign immunity emanates from the Eleventh Amendment, and acts to immunize states from civil suit. In Covidien LP v. University of Florida Research Foundation … Continue Reading
This past summer, the Supreme Court settled the debate about the standard to be applied by the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) in construing patent claims – finding its use of the broadest reasonable interpretation (BRI), the approach used by the US patent office for the past century, was proper.1 Its decision left in … Continue Reading
