Patent Law Weblog
recent posts
- Why the Alice Test is Stupid, Part IV: The Usefulness Paradox
- Teva Capitulates to Federal Trade Commission Coercion
- USPTO Issues Memoranda on Subject Matter Eligibility
- USPTO Revokes Guidance on AI-Assisted Inventorship, But Rules Remain Basically the Same
- Why the Alice Test is Stupid, Part III: Eligible Independent Claims Can Have Ineligible Dependent Claims
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Category: Patent Prosecution
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By Andrew Velzen — I have previously written extensively on the ongoing legal battle between Nintendo / The Pokémon Company (referred to herein collectively as simply "Nintendo") and PocketPair over PocketPair's popular video game Palworld.[1] This past week, PocketPair published a blog post addressing some of the recent and upcoming in-game changes.[2] The PocketPair blog…
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By Michael Borella — Any patent attorney who has been in the business for more than a few years understands from experience that some USPTO examiners are tougher than others. This should not be surprising, as each examiner is an individual who is applying their own experience and knowledge during the examination process, which inherently…
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By Donald Zuhn — In a final rule published in the Federal Register (88 Fed. Reg. 12560) last week, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office announced that it will start issuing patents electronically under a new digital USPTO seal and bearing the digital signature of the USPTO Director beginning on Tuesday, April 18, 2023. The…
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By Michael Borella — The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) organizes its examining corps into technical centers (TCs). Each TC is dedicated to one or more general technical fields. In some cases, one TC may include two or more unrelated fields, while some fields (software, for example) are represented in multiple TCs. Currently there…
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Life Sciences "Top 56" By Donald Zuhn — Last month, the Intellectual Property Owners Association (IPO) and Harrity Analytics announced the release of the 40th annual list of the top 300 organizations receiving U.S. utility patents (see "Top 300 Organizations Granted U.S. Patents in 2022"). Patent Docs readers may recall that the U.S. Patent and…
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By Aaron Gin and Yuri Levin-Schwartz* — OpenAI's prototype of ChatGPT, released at the end of November 2022, drew rapid, widespread public attention for its ability to provide articulate, human-like responses across a wide variety of knowledge domains. Numerous articles have already explored large language models like ChatGPT and what they can and cannot do…
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By Donald Zuhn –- After reflecting upon the events of the past twelve months, Patent Docs presents its 16th annual list of top patent stories. For 2022, we identified ten 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 Michael Borella — With further apologies to David Letterman. Almost two years ago we published Stupid § 101 Tricks, an article discussing some of the annoying, improper, and yet disappointingly common patterns seen in rejection and invalidation of claims for allegedly lacking patentable subject matter. Moving on from there, Section § 102 of the…
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By Donald Zuhn — Earlier today, the National Academy of Inventors (NAI) and the Intellectual Property Owners Association (IPO) published their annual list of the top 100 worldwide universities that received the most U.S. utility patents during the 2021 calendar year. The NAI is a member organization comprising U.S. and international universities, and governmental and…
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By Michael Borella — The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office handles hundreds of thousands of patent applications per year, as well as various types of administrative patent proceedings. While the USPTO has made incremental improvements in its examination practices and IT systems to streamline applicant workflows, there are a number of relatively small changes that it…
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