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 — U.S. patent law grants patent owners the right to grant licenses to their patents in analogy to landlords granting rents to real property as a license to use without obtaining ownership. 35 U.S.C. §§ 261-262. But the complexities that can ensue, both in what is licensed and when it is…
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By Kevin E. Noonan — One of the casualties of the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act in 2012 was 35 U.S.C. § 145, which had provided recourse to U.S. District Courts for U.S. patent applicants disgruntled with a determination of unpatentability before the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, but was abrogated under certain circumstances (e.g., IPRs)…
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By Kevin E. Noonan — The Federal Circuit addressed questions of motivation to combine and reasonable expectation of success in finding obviousness as well as when an obviousness determination by the Patent Trial and Appeal Board is supported by substantial evidence, in Almirall, LLC v. Amneal Pharmaceuticals LLC. The case arose in an inter partes…
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By Michael Borella — There is a theme running through many patent-eligibility disputes that is analogous to baiting-and-switching. One party has claims that recite an invention. The other party characterizes those claims at a high level or generalizes them to the point that much of the actual claim language is largely ignored. Then, the other…
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By Kevin E. Noonan — In a crowded pharmaceutical art, the deficiencies thereof being so patent that the FDA encouraged industry to address and correct them, concerning a formulation developed to address the opioid crisis raging earlier in this century (see "Empire of Pain"), when is a resulting formulation obvious over that prior art and…
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Federal Circuit Denies En Banc Review in GlaxoSmithKline LLC v. Teva Pharmaceuticals USA By Kevin E. Noonan — The 2020 decision by a divided Federal Circuit panel in GlaxoSmithKline LLC v. Teva Pharmaceuticals USA regarding the extent to which an ANDA applicant who obtained regulatory approval under the Section viii carve-out provisions of the statute…
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By Michael Borella — Mentone sued Digi for alleged infringement of Mentone's U.S. Patent No. 6,952,413. The U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware found the claims of the patent to be ineligible under 35 U.S.C. § 101. Mentone appealed. The invention of the '413 patent is directed to improvements in the allocation of…
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By Donald Zuhn –- After reflecting upon the events of the past twelve months, Patent Docs presents its 15th annual list of top patent stories. For 2021, we identified nine stories that were covered on Patent Docs last year that we believe had (or are likely to have) a significant impact on patent practitioners and…
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By Kevin E. Noonan — When does the absence of evidence turn into evidence of absence, and when does such absence amount to an adequate written description of the absence of a step of a method claim? This is a question that comes readily to mind when reading the Federal Circuit's opinion (and Chief Judge…
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By Kevin E. Noonan — While the Federal Circuit has patent law as its principal focus, as a U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, questions come before the Court on more mundane, procedural matters (which, sometimes being dispositive, does not reduce their importance to the parties and occasionally the rest of us). One such case was…
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