The PTAB recently issued a final written decision on remand from the Federal Circuit, holding all claims to be unpatentable in Athena Automation Ltd., v. Husky Injection Molding Sys. Ltd., IPR2013-00290, Paper 61 (P.T.A.B. Apr. 28, 2017). This decision reversed the PTAB’s original decision that certain claims were not anticipated by a reference that referred to disclosures from another document.
Four recent Final Written Decisions from the PTAB supported patentability on the rare basis of “secondary considerations of nonobviousness” in Varian Medical Systems, Inc. v. William Beaumont Hospital, IPR2016-00162, Paper 69; IPR2016-00166, Paper 69; IPR2016-00170, Paper 69; IPR2016-00171, Paper 81 (P.T.A.B. May 4, 2017).
The USPTO Director granted a request to extend a missed deadline for an appeal of an IPR decision to the Federal Circuit due to the patent owner’s excusable neglect in Mitsubishi Cable Industr., Ltd. v. Goto Denshi Co., Ltd., IPR2015-01108, Paper 28 (P.T.A.B. May 4, 2017).
On April 4, 2017, the Ninth Circuit ruled that Urban Outfitters and Century 21 (collectively “Urban”) were liable for willful infringement of a copyrighted fabric design owned by Unicolors Inc. Unicolors is a Los Angeles based company that designs and sells fabric to customers in the apparel market. Urban Outfitters is a retail company with over 500 stores worldwide. Century 21 is a department store that purchases products from Urban Outfitters.
In the fashion and beauty world, the copying of higher-priced brands is widespread. While in fashion, the term for copies of designer products is “knockoffs,” in beauty, the term is “dupes.” Whether it is a colloquial use of the word “dupe” or an abbreviation of “duplicate,” to beauty brand consumers the word dupe has come to mean a cheaper alternative to higher-end products.
The sale of a product prior to filing a patent application, or “on-sale bar,” has long been a potential barrier to obtaining a patent in the United States. Especially in the biotechnology space, which can involve a long development cycle and regulatory approval cycle, pre-clinical manufacturing and testing activity has the potential to limit patent rights by triggering the on-sale bar.
The PTAB expunged non-compliant motions for observations on cross-examination in Xilinx, Inc. v. Papst Licensing GMBH & Co., KG, IPR2016-00104, Paper 22 & IPR2016-00105, Paper 22 (P.T.A.B. May 3, 2017).
Patent enforcement by Texas-based DataTreasury Corp. (“DataTreasury”) was a key motivation for the creation of Covered Business Method Review (“CBM”) proceedings. Senator Charles Schumer of New York, referring to DataTreasury, explained that “one company has made a cottage industry out of extracting legal settlements by exploiting a fuzzy part of the law on patents.”
In Superior Communications, Inc. v. Voltstar Technologies, Inc., IPR2017-00067, Paper 14 (P.T.A.B. Apr. 25, 2017), the Patent Trial and Appeal Board instituted inter partes review of U.S. Patent No. 7,910,833, despite Voltstar’s objection that such an institution was statutorily barred under 35 U.S.C. § 315(b).
An MIT group consisting of the CRISPR pioneer Feng Zhang and 18 of his colleagues recently published a paper in Science demonstrating a new platform for using CRISPR technology as a diagnostic tool for detecting nucleic acids. The CRISPR-based diagnostic tool (or CRISPR-Dx) may be valuable for applications ranging from detecting the presence of bacterial or viral pathogens to nucleic acid markers for genetic diseases or cancer.
