Patent Law Weblog
recent posts
- REGENEXBIO Inc. v. Sarepta Therapeutics, Inc. (Fed. Cir. 2026)
- Apple v. Squires: USPTO Director Has Unlimited Discretion on IPR Institution
- The Ghost in the Machine: Why GenAI Can Be Both a Brilliant Researcher and a Terrible Advocate
- Bayer Files Suit Against Trio of COVID-19 Vaccine Makers
- Allen v. Cooper (4th Cir. 2026)
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Category: Federal Circuit
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By Kevin E. Noonan – The Federal Circuit soon will have the opportunity to decide a question left open during a recent spate of opinions involving the judicially created doctrine of obviousness-type double patenting (OTDP): the effect patent term adjustment (PTA) can (or should) have on creating circumstances where OTDP will operate to find a patent…
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By Michael Borella — In a ruling that should surprise absolutely nobody, the Federal Circuit rapidly scrapped an appeal of a PTAB decision that affirmed a 35 U.S.C. § 101 rejection of a business method claim. This is the latest in a series of cases going back years in which the Court tends to find…
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By Brian A. Pattengale* and Anthony D. Sabatelli** — Decades after the science-fiction visions of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot, artificial intelligence ("AI") is finally moving to the mainstream. Many of us use digital assistants like Apple's Siri or Google's Alexa every day, and we gape, with a mixture…
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By Kevin E. Noonan — For most of the past decade, the Supreme Court has been marking out the metes and bounds of the Patent Trial and Appeal Board's execution of the post-grant review provisions of the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act, particularly with regard to inter partes reviews (see "Oil States Energy Services, LLC. v.…
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By Kevin E. Noonan — The consequences of expressly recited claim limitations and how patentees can be held to these limitations was illustrated in the Federal Circuit's recent decision in Par Pharmaceutical, Inc. v. Eagle Pharmaceuticals, Inc. The case arose in ANDA litigation over Eagle's application to market a generic version of Par's Vasostrict® product,…
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By Kevin E. Noonan — Last year, the Supreme Court declined an invitation to abrogate the doctrine of assignor estoppel by an assignor sued for patent infringement in Minerva Surgical v. Hologic. Nevertheless, the Court followed its proclivities and vacated the Federal Circuit's opinion based on how the appellate court applied the doctrine and remanded. …
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By Kevin E. Noonan — A little more than three years ago, the Federal Circuit rejected the University of Minnesota's contention that LSI was barred from bringing (and the Patent Trial and Appeal Board barred from hearing) an inter partes review of certain University-owned patents under the sovereign immunity doctrine; see "Regents of the University…
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By Michael Borella — Bad law often gives rise to creative legal arguments. But the application of such creative lawyering is necessarily bounded by ethical rules and notions of fair dealing. Patent eligibility, in its current incarnation, has been argued to be bad law by many. The current judicial interpretation of 35 U.S.C. § 101 is…
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By Kevin E. Noonan — The Federal Circuit today affirmed determinations by the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) in an inter partes review in American National Manufacturing v. Sleep Number Corp., in an opinion by Judge Cunningham. The opinion was not Judge Cunningham's first Federal Circuit opinion but it is likely to be her…
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By Michael Borella — Self-similarity is a characteristic found in many physical, natural, and human-made systems. In short, it describes a class of structures or behaviors that are at least partially-invariant to time or scale. Thus, these structures or behaviors appear similar in various mathematical ways whether viewed in small or large samples. A well-known class…
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