An IPR “shall be terminated with respect to any petitioner upon the joint request of the petitioner and patent owner, unless the Office has decided the merits of the proceeding before the request for termination is filed.” ...more
Q: I was appointed a receiver to collect a judgment. I have not yet filed my final account and report, the court has not approved my final fees. Other creditors of the judgment debtor are demanding that I pay them, because...more
NVIDIA petitioned for IPR of two patents owned by Polaris. The Board found the challenged claims unpatentable. Polaris appealed. While on appeal, the final written decisions in those IPRs were vacated and the proceedings were...more
Intuitive filed three IPR petitions, all on the same day, challenging Ethicon’s endoscopic surgical instrument patent. The petitions challenged overlapping claims based on different combinations of prior art references. The...more
As part of the recovery from the global COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit took steps to return to normal operations. It began requiring live oral arguments in August 2022 and, by November,...more
In Polaris Innovations Ltd. v. Brent, No. 2019-1483, 2022 WL 4241665 (Fed. Cir. Sept. 15, 2022), the Federal Circuit faced an appeal that had bounced back and forth between the Court and Patent Trial and Appeal Board (“the...more
The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed an order denying the defendants’ motion to discharge a receiver who had been appointed to aid in the execution of a judgment for violations of the Copyright Act. WB Music...more
When the alimony statute was modified in 2014, aside from making 67 the presumptive, good faith retirement age, it also included multiple standards for the court to consider when a party sought to terminate or modify alimony...more
In Intuitive Surgical, Inc. v. Ethicon LLC, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit recently affirmed that estoppel under 35 U.S.C. § 315(e)(1) can apply as between concurrently filed inter partes review (IPR)...more
TIMING OF REQUEST KEY FOR BOARD DECISIONS ON MOTIONS TO TERMINATE - In Ocado Group PLC v. AutoStore Technology AS, PGR2021-00038 (July 30, 2021), Petitioner moved to withdraw its petition, arguing that efficiency favored...more
The sale order should require that the receiver file an accounting of its activities as receiver within so many days of the sale of the property. Once that has been filed, the secured lenders counsel can file a motion to...more
For more than a decade, some of Britney Spears’s most devoted fans feared that she was locked up against her will under a court-ordered conservatorship, even going as far to accuse her father, Jamie Spears, of drugging her to...more
A recent Initial Determination (“ID”) by ALJ Cheney illustrates how the government shutdown earlier this year effectively made this ITC investigation “toothless” since relief was not practicable before the patents would...more
The ITC recently denied a joint motion to terminate an investigation on the basis of settlement after the parties failed to meet the requisite conditions. See In re Certain Child Carriers and Components Thereof, Inv. No....more
The Federal Circuit recently decided a reexamination case, VirnetX v. Apple and Cisco, that addressed two issues: (1) was requester estopped from maintaining its reexams under the pre-AIA version of 35 U.S.C. § 317(b) (2006)...more
Addressing the interplay between a district court’s indefiniteness determination and a pending inter partes review (IPR) proceeding, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) denied a patent owner’s motion to terminate the...more
In IPR2018-00272, the Board denied a motion to terminate brought by a Patent Owner who argued that a district court’s finding of indefiniteness required termination of the PTAB proceedings for U.S. Patent. 9,393,208....more
In a case of first impression, the PTAB recently decided that the doctrine of tribal sovereign immunity does not apply to inter partes review proceedings. See Mylan Pharmaceuticals Inc. v. Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe,...more
The AIA expressly anticipates and permits a patent owner and a petitioner to reach a settlement during the pendency of a post-grant proceeding. For IPRs, 35 U.S.C. § 317(a) is entitled “Settlement” and provides, in pertinent...more
In a recently issued claim construction order, Chief Administrative Law Judge Bullock held that terms included in all asserted claims are indefinite. He accordingly found the asserted claims invalid, stayed the Investigation,...more
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC or the “Commission”) recently restored its quorum with the swearing in of Commissioners Neil Chatterjee and Robert Powelson, but the casualties from the six-month, quorumless...more
The patent statute requires the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) to issue a final written decision within one year of instituting an Inter Partes Review (IPR). The recent case of Petroleum Geo-Services Inc. v. Westerngeo...more
In an order issued in Petroleum Geo-Services Inc. v. Westerngeco LLC, IPR2016-00407, IPR2016-00499, Paper 29 (P.TA.B. Jul. 5, 2017), the PTAB terminated the proceedings after the parties indicated that they had settled their...more
On May 23, 2017, the PTAB granted the University of Maryland’s (UM) motion to terminate inter partes review based on UM’s sovereign immunity in Neochord, Inc. v. Univ. of Maryland, Baltimore and Harpoon Medical, Inc.,...more
It has been four years since the first inter partes review proceedings were filed in the United States. The first IPR petition, filed on September 16, 2012 (the first day IPRs became available), made it all the way to the...more