Patent Law Weblog
recent posts
- To Require an Inventor ID, or Not to Require an Inventor ID – That Is the Question
- Federal Circuit Refuses to Switch District Court’s Finding for Nintendo
- Supreme Court to Resolve Dispute Over Marketing of “Skinny Labeled” Generics
- Solicitor General Proves Persuasive; Supreme Court Grants Hikma’s Certiorari Petition
- CNIPA Implements Inventor ID Requirement
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Category: Inventorship
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By Manav Das — The United States Constitution[1] provides the basis for patent laws; it says "Congress shall have power . . . to promote the progress of science and useful arts by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries" (emphasis added). It is a…
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By Aaron Gin — Dr. Stephen Thaler, Ph.D., a computer scientist and inventor, has petitioned the Supreme Court of the United States to consider the question of whether the Patent Act restricts the definition of an "inventor" to human beings. The petition represents an opportunity for the Court to clarify whether an artificial intelligence (AI)…
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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 — Joint inventorship has been called "one of the muddiest concepts in the muddy metaphysics of patent law" because the "exact parameters of what constitutes joint inventorship are quite difficult to define." Mueller Brass Co. v. Reading Indus., 352 F. Supp. 1357, 1372 (E.D. Pa. 1972), aff'd, 487 F.3d 1395 (3d…
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By Kevin E. Noonan — The Federal Circuit has taken the occasion, in appeals from the Patent Trial and Appeal Board as well as district courts, to remand judgments whenever the Court believes that the record below is devoid of sufficient detail to properly assess the correctness of the decisions made below (see "Merck Sharp…
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By Donald Zuhn — In a Decision on Petition issued in April, and signed by Deputy Commissioner for Patent Examination Policy Robert W. Bahr, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office refused to vacate a Notice to File Missing Parts of Nonprovisional Application mailed on August 8, 2019 in U.S. Application No. 16/524,350. The '350 application,…
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By Joshua Rich — Parties often push experts to testify outside their area of expertise and leave it up to the expert to push back when uncomfortable. If the expert fails to do so, a party's aggressiveness may come back to haunt it before the Court. That is why the Scentsational case, although nonprecedential, serves…
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By Donald Zuhn — Earlier this month, in Chen v. Jung, District Judge Manuel L. Real of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California issued an order denying a motion for summary judgment filed by Defendants, finding that genuine issues of material fact existed with respect to Plaintiff's contribution to the conception…
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By Kevin E. Noonan — Inventorship, particularly assertion of proper inventorship, has a unique place in U.S. patent law. This is based in large part on the language of Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the U.S. Constitution, which gives Congress the power to grant patents "to Inventors." Ample evidence of the primacy of…
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By Donald Zuhn — Last week, in Pappalardo v. Stevins, the Federal Circuit affirmed-in-part, vacated-in-part, and remanded a decision by the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida granting a motion to dismiss filed by Defendant-Appellee Samantha Stevins, in which Ms. Stevins sought to dismiss an amended complaint filed by Plaintiff-Appellant Michael Pappalardo…
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