Before Prost, Wallach, and Chen. Appeal from the United States District Court for the District of Delaware.
Summary: A post-URAA patent that issues after but expires before a related pre-URAA patent is not a double-patenting reference against the pre-URAA patent.
Before Moore, Chen, and Hughes. Appeal from the United States District Court for the District of Delaware.
Summary: Obviousness-type double patenting does not invalidate an otherwise validly obtained patent term extension under 35 U.S.C. § 156.
Before Lourie, O’Malley, and Stoll. Appeal from the United States International Trade Commission.
Summary: After institution, the Commission cannot without opposition or appearance from respondents assert insufficient pleadings as a basis for denying relief under 19 U.S.C. § 1337(g)(1).
Abbott announced on October 19, 2018 that its HeartMate 3 Left Ventricular Assist Device (LVAD) has received U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval as a destination therapy for people living with advanced heart failure. Physicians now can offer the HeartMate 3 system to patients not eligible for a transplant. The HeartMate 3 LVAD can serve as a permanent implant, allowing patients to live with the device for the rest of their lives.
Medical devices are increasingly incorporating software and other computer elements, but software and computer patents are in the middle of a multi-year battle between different worldviews. This battle is destined to trap more and more medical device patents in a strange procedural limbo.
On May 3, 2018, Nike filed a lawsuit against Puma in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts accusing Puma of infringing seven of its utility patents related to footwear. In an earlier post on this blog, we described some of the Nike shoe patents asserted. Puma challenged Nike’s complaint and moved to dismiss Nike’s claims of alleged infringement as to two of the patents, specifically as to U.S. Patent No. 8,266,749 and No. 9,078,488, arguing that these two patents, which are directed to Nike’s “Flyknit®” technology, do not cover patentable subject matter.
Patent eligibility challenges under 35 U.S.C. §101 have been effective tools for defendants to obtain early dismissal of a case without extensive fact finding since the Supreme Court ruling in Alice. Whether a claim recites patent eligible subject matter is a question of law.[1] Thus, defendants can challenge patent eligibility at the outset of the case, either through a motion to dismiss under 12(b)(6) or on a motion for summary judgment, with the goal of concluding the litigation without incurring the expense of discovery and trial.
Before Dyk, Reyna, and Hughes. Appeal from the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Tennessee.
Summary: In the context of a suit for a declaration of non-infringement and invalidity of a patent, the “minimum contacts” prong of personal jurisdiction is satisfied only if the patentee directed some patent enforcement activity to the forum state.
Before Newman, Mayer, and Stoll. Appeal from the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board.
Summary: Words that are primarily a surname can be registered as trademarks if they have acquired secondary meaning, even if the public also associates the surname with a famous individual.
In 2017, New Jersey based biotech startup Modern Meadow launched Zoa™, which is inspired by leather and is the company’s first brand of biofabricated materials. Zoa™, a name derived from the Greek term for life, zoi, will feature products created with Modern Meadow’s proprietary technology. According to the Zoa website, Modern Meadow’s first generation of materials have “the ability to be any density, hold to any mold, create any shape, take on any texture, combine with any other material and be any size.”
