The Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) has issued a decision in an ex parte appeal reversing an examiner’s final rejection under 35 U.S.C. § 101 of claims directed to artificial intelligence (AI) based business methods. Ex...more
Introduction - The new United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Director John A. Squires was sworn in on September 22, 2025 and wasted no time that week in expanding patent eligibility for AI related inventions. In...more
Just days after John A. Squires was sworn in as the 60th Director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) on September 23, 2025, he convened the rarely used Appeals Review Panel (ARP) and issued a decision in Ex parte...more
Each year since 2021, we have examined how the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) has been deciding appeals of § 101 rejections from examiners. And so far, the numbers have been remarkably...more
The last 11 years have taught us much about the Federal Circuit; namely, that a majority of the judges simply do not seem to appreciate software. Given the statements that several have made in opinions, one might be able to...more
Stark, J. Sage Products, LLC (“Sage”) challenged a Patent Trial and Appeal Board (“Board”) decision finding two of Sage’s patents unpatentable. After the original appellee, Becton, Dickinson and Co., withdrew, the Director of...more
Innovators seeking patent protection for software inventions should be aware that all software inventions face patent-eligibility issues. Nevertheless, patent practitioners who are experienced in the art of software patent...more
On April 18, 2025, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ("Federal Circuit") issued a significant decision in Recentive Analytics, Inc. v. Fox Corp., affirming dismissal, by the District Court of...more
For the last several years, patentees and patent practitioners have been waiting for the Federal Circuit to weigh in on the patent eligibility of machine learning models. There was an expectation that, like any other...more
On February 13, 2025, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) issued a precedential decision reversing the International Trade Commission finding that US Synthetic’s composition of matter claim was not...more
As 2024 draws to a close, several crucial developments — some aimed at modernizing long-standing legal practices, others addressing emerging challenges — have reached patent law. Originally published in Law360 - December...more