The Federal Circuit affirmed a California district court's judgment of noninfringement but vacated its judgment of invalidity for lack of enablement since the defendants' proposed non-enabling facial animation techniques did...more
Patent eligibility is a bit of a mess these days. Ever since the Supreme Court handed down the Alice v. CLS Bank decision six years ago, the distinction between what might be subject matter that can be patented and what is...more
The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit vacated a summary judgment finding an asserted patent invalid for lack of enablement while affirming the holding of non-infringement. McRO, Inc. v. Bandai Namco Games America...more
At a recent Knobbe Martens and Bugnion SpA Seminar, Vlad Teplitskiy presented on patentable subject matter in the U.S. ...more
Arbitration - Waymo v. Uber Technologies, 870 F.3d 1342 (Fed. Cir. 2017) - Waymo sued Uber and others for trade secret misappropriation and patent infringement. Uber contends that Waymo should be compelled to...more
It has now been over three years since the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its transformative patent decision in Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank. During that time, the Federal Circuit has issued only a precious few decisions upholding...more
The Federal Circuit recently held in RecogniCorp, LLC v. Nintendo Co., Ltd. (Fed. Cir. 2016) that claims directed to encoding and decoding image data were not patent-eligible under 35 U.S.C. § 101. This ruling further...more
Recognicorp, owner of U.S. Patent No. 8,005,303, sued Nintendo for infringement in the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon. After a transfer to the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington and...more
In 2014, the U.S. Supreme Court established the current framework for determining patent-eligible subject matter in Alice. The Alice framework is a two-part test, with step one requiring a determination regarding whether a...more
We wrote earlier about the Supreme Court’s renewed interest in patent eligibility and seemingly unintended confusion between the patent eligibility requirements of 35 U.S.C. § 101 and the remaining patentability requirements...more
Software Patent Directed to Pairing Activity Trackers to a Device Considered Patent-Eligible - In the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California (San Jose Division), Fitbit, Inc., sued Aliphcom (d/b/a...more
In recent years, software patents have come under fire from legislation (the American Invents Act) that has generally made patents easier to invalidate, and from court decisions (the Supreme Court’s decision in Alice v. CLS...more
As 2017 begins and IP strategies are being developed for the new year, it is a good time to reflect on what IP issues were prominent in 2016. According to the many readers of Global IP Matters, hot topics included navigating...more
Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati is pleased to present its 2016 Patent Litigation Year in Review. WSGR’s patent litigation practice is nationwide in scope and has received national recognition in recent years, with our...more
On November 2, 2016, the United States Patent and Trademark Office ("USPTO") issued a memorandum to Examiners ("Memorandum") updating the USPTO's May 2016 subject matter eligibility ("SME") guidance in light of recent...more
As technologies advance, the Patent Office (as well as the Nation’s courts) must utilize Section 101 of the Patent Act to place reasonable limitations on patent eligibility to ensure that our patent system balances the...more
On November 2, 2016, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) issued a memorandum ("November 2016 Memo") to its patent examiners, updating them on recent subject matter eligibility decisions from the U.S. Court of Appeals...more
In the wake of Alice the waters of eligibility under section 101 can be challenging to navigate, and particularly so for those seeking to obtain or enforce software patents. A two-part test for eligibility is the standard,...more
If you have talked about patenting inventions lately, you might have been told that software per se is not eligible for patenting and that you should protect your business’s intellectual property (IP) using copyrights, trade...more
Over the past six years, the U.S. Supreme Court has issued a series of decisions—Bilski, Mayo, Myriad, and Alice—that have significantly impacted patent eligibility law, particularly in the areas of software and...more