PODCAST: Williams Mullen's Trending Now: An IP Podcast - Artificial Intelligence Patents & Emerging Regulatory Laws
John Harmon on the Evolving Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Intellectual Property
What You Should Know About Seeking Patent Protection in Vietnam
JONES DAY PRESENTS®: Artificial Intelligence: The Growing Role of AI on Patents
Drafting Software Patents In A Post-Alice World
In 2014, the Supreme Court upended U.S. patent law in the landmark ruling for Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank International. The Alice decision established new standards for determining whether inventions, especially those related...more
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office published new guidance in the Federal Register on November 17, 2023, that clarifies the requirements for design patents of computer-generated images, icons, and graphical user interfaces. ...more
The USPTO has prepared soon to be published supplemental guidance for design patent examination for computer-generated electronic images. This guidance relates to determining whether a design patent claim including a...more
A Federal Circuit judge, sitting by designation in the District of Delaware, granted-in-part and denied-in-part a Rule 12(c) motion by the defendant for judgment based on patent eligibility under 35 U.S.C. § 101. The case...more
Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is a technology promising to disrupt how artwork is created, software is developed, and text is written. This disruption brings with it a host of new legal questions surrounding...more
This article supplements our previous post with updated 2021 data. U.S. design patents continue to grow in popularity. Although 2021 saw a slight downtick in the number of issued design patents compared to the previous...more
Patent protection is perhaps the most contentious form of IP protection for software. There is no surer way to start a fight amongst the various interest groups interested in patents than to discuss software patents — both...more
No Assembly, No Infringement – Federal Circuit Declines to Expand the “Final Assembler” Theory of Direct Infringement In Acceleration Bay LLC v. Take-Two Interactive Software, Appeal No. 20-1700 the Federal Circuit held that...more
Over the last 20 years, the total number of design patents issued per year in the United States has erupted. As illustrated in the graph below and further highlighted in this animated graph, in the 30 year period between the...more
It is well known that in the U.S., abstract ideas, laws of nature, natural phenomena, and products of nature are all excluded from patenting under 35 U.S.C. § 101. This article briefly outlines various U.S. approaches to...more
Plaintiff brought suit in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California for alleged infringement of U.S. Patent No. 8,548,902, which related to online loan origination services. The defendant moved for...more
Addressing an issue of software subject matter eligibility, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit reversed the district court’s judgment on the pleadings under 35 USC § 101, finding claims related to error checking...more
It is axiomatic that in order for information to be considered a trade secret, it must have been kept secret. But what if the trade secret is disclosed without the owner’s consent? Such was the issue in Intellisoft, Ltd. v....more
On 16 October 2019, Advocate General Tanchev of the CJEU has issued his opinion in Sky v SkyKick one of the most intriguing trade mark cases at the moment which will likely have a significant impact on EU trade mark law....more
Much of the modern economy is driven by software development. Companies are creating and refining new apps that run on mobile devices, and using machine learning to provide users with personalized user interfaces and...more
A new Federal Circuit decision found the claims of a patent directed to software license verification to be eligible for patenting under Section 101 of the Patent Act. In Ancora Technologies, Inc. v. HTC America, Inc., the...more
Two recent Federal Circuit decisions in the U.S., both penned by Judge Moore, significantly raise the bar for accused infringers seeking to invalidate patents on § 101 grounds before trial. Although one prior Federal Circuit...more
On July 3, 2017, revised Guidelines for Examination of Computer Related Inventions (CRIs) were released. The full text of the guidelines may be found here. ...more
The Federal Circuit recently decided two related cases concerning media content delivery patents1 owned by Affinity Labs of Texas, LLC. In both cases, the Federal Circuit held that the patents do not cover patent-eligible...more
Can boilerplate language describing possible variations to an invention ever impact validity of a patent? Many software patents include standard “boilerplate” text describing many ways to implement an invention, such as by...more
Over the years, it has proven difficult to fit software in any one category of IP protection. And while software’s ability to seemingly transcend patents, copyright, and trade secrets provides software developers and...more
The Federal Circuit last week handed down the latest in a series of decisions finding computer-implemented inventions to be patent-eligible under 35 U.S.C. § 101. In McRO, Inc. v. Bandai Namco Games America, Inc. et al. (Fed....more
The case demonstrates that the eligibility analysis is highly fact-specific and dependent on properly construed claims. In McRO, Inc. v. Bandai Namco Games America Inc., a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the...more
Over the past two months, the trends I've discussed in my previous blogs on AliceStorm have continued and become more entrenched. In particular, the Federal Circuit has been quite active, issuing nine decisions since late...more
Addressing both the circumstances that lead to a claim limitation invoking a means-plus-function construction and indefiniteness issues for means-plus-function claims, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed...more