Category: Uncategorized

By Kevin E. Noonan – The Parties – Senior Party Broad Institute, Harvard University, and MIT (collectively, “Broad”) and Junior Party Regents of the University of California, Berkeley; University of Vienna; and Emmanuelle Charpentier (collectively “CVC”) – each timely filed a paper on conception dates upon which they intend to rely in the Patent Trial…

By Michael Borella – Among the many failings of the current U.S. patent eligibility framework under 35 U.S.C. § 101, perhaps none is more corrosive to the patent system’s basic function than the fact that the framework keeps changing.  The judicial exceptions to patentability are, in theory, stable background principles.  These exceptions limit the breadth…

By Kevin E. Noonan – Neither the Parties nor the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) have been resting in addressing the decision by the Federal Circuit that vacated and remanded the Board’s decision awarding priority in Interference No. 106,115 to Senior Party The Broad Institute, Harvard University, and MIT (collectively, “Broad”; Junior Party is…

By Kevin E. Noonan – The course of the proceedings involving the attempts to remove Judge Pauline Newman from the Federal Circuit is long and in many senses tragic (see links below).  Last week the latest, and likely last, Act of this sad drama was initiated by Judge Newman filing a petition for certiorari with…

By Kevin E. Noonan – One of the beneficial characteristics of the response to the COVID-19 pandemic were pledges from companies involved in developing vaccines (such as Moderna, Pfizer, BioNTech and others) not to enforce patents on relevant technology during the duration.  That restraint has long-since vanished (as has the global pandemic effects of the…

By Kevin E. Noonan – A consequence of the gradual decline in COVID infections worldwide has been a less gradual increase in patent litigation by the many entities having patent rights for the vaccines or components of them.  This is particularly true of the so-called “mRNA” vaccines, which have been the subject of development by…

By Joshua Rich – On February 27, 2026, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice filed a “Statement of Interest” in Collision Communications, Inc. v. Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., a case pending in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas in which the judge…

By Michael Borella – If we have learned anything from the last twelve years of patent eligibility jurisprudence, it is that the Federal Circuit continues to find new ways to disappoint.  The Federal Circuit’s recent nonprecedential decision in Oasis Tooling, Inc. v. Siemens Industry Software Inc. is a master class in how not to conduct…

By Michael Borella – The current cultural moment around artificial intelligence has the hallmarks of a moral panic.  The doomsayers warn of job-annihilating robots, misinformation that will corrode democracy, and energy-hungry data centers boiling the oceans one large language model (LLM) query at a time.  The accelerationists, meanwhile, promise us that superintelligent systems will cure…

By Kevin E. Noonan – One of the paradoxically beneficial consequences of the COVID pandemic was that even without the compulsory aspects of the vaccine patent waiver proposed by certain WTO member states (Brazil, India, and South Africa in particular) vaccine makers, especially Moderna and BioNTech/Pfizer foreswore exercising their patent rights in favor of facilitating…