Five Impactful USPTO Procedural Developments for Patent Practitioners
Nonpublication Requests For Patent Applications: Disadvantages
[IP Hot Topics Podcast] Innovation Conversations: Andrei Iancu
K-Fee System GmbH v. Nespresso USA, Inc., Appeal No. 2022-2042 (Fed. Cir. Dec. 26, 2023) In an appeal from a district court judgment of noninfringement, the Federal Circuit reversed the underlying claim construction...more
Many people applying for a patent in the United States only consider filing in other countries as an afterthought. You should consider whether you want to file in foreign countries before filing a nonprovisional application...more
Article 84 of the European Patent Convention (EPC) requires that the claims of a European patent application “shall define the matter for which protection is sought” and “shall be clear and concise and be supported by the...more
Just about anywhere in the world is where one may claim a patent with an international PCT patent application. There are, after all, 154 countries bound by the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT). But almost no one, except...more
This article discusses aspects of ex parte appeals of patent applications before the European Patent Office (EPO). A patent applicant may appeal an examiner’s decision on refusing to grant a patent application to the EPO...more
China - On 28 January 2020, CNIPA (China's National Intellectual Property Administration) published Notice 350 (see here, in Chinese), which is applicable to trademarks, patents and layout designs of integrated circuits....more
On Wednesday, World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom declared that the COVID-19 outbreak "can be characterized as a pandemic," cautioning that the WHO has "rung the alarm bell loud and clear." At the time...more
In the patent grant proceedings for two European Patent Applications, the EPO has ruled that an AI machine cannot be named as an inventor in a Patent Application. Doing so does not comply with the requirement to designate the...more
This article discusses challenges in prosecuting bioinformatics patent applications before the European Patent Office (EPO). The EPO determines the subject-matter eligibility of bioinformatics patent applications under...more
The Guidelines for Examination in the European Patent Office (EPO) permit the use of post-filing experimental data in a limited manner to support the scope of objected claims. However, reliance on post-filing data differs...more
Both the European Patent Office (EPO) and the Japanese Patent Office (JPO) accept a third party observation regarding validity of a patent application. In February 2012, it was announced that third party observations could be...more
A Survey of Third Party Observation Systems - Third party observations can be a cost-effective way of introducing prior art or arguments related to patentability of a published patent application. The September 2018 issue...more
In a notice published earlier this week in the Federal Register (80 Fed. Reg. 65649), the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office issued a final rule revising the rules of practice to permit applicants to authorize the USPTO to give...more
According to a recent survey of over 100 companies and universities, nearly 93% who filed patent families in 2013 filed at least some of those patent families internationally. While obtaining patent protection abroad is...more
Public perception of the patent system has swung widely over the years from highs, such as those in the late nineteenth century when Mark Twain could write “a country without a patent office and good patent laws was just a...more