What Were the Cooler Wars? (Part 2) — No Infringement Intended Podcast
A Guide to SEP: Standard Essential Patents for Tech Startups
Hilary Preston, Vice Chair at Vinson & Elkins, Discusses Energy Innovation: Protecting Your Intellectual Property Portfolio
What Were the Cooler Wars? (Part 1) — No Infringement Intended Podcast
5 Key Takeaways | Building a Winning Evidentiary Record at the PTAB (and Surviving Appeal)
(Podcast) The Briefing: 2025 IP Resolutions Start With a Review of IP Assets
The Briefing: 2025 IP Resolutions Start With a Review of IP Assets
Wolf Greenfield Attorneys Review 2024 and Look Ahead to 2025
(Podcast) The Briefing: A Very Patented Christmas – The Quirkiest Inventions for the Holiday Season
The Briefing: A Very Patented Christmas – The Quirkiest Inventions for the Holiday Season
A Conversation with Phil Hamzik
5 Key Takeaways | Alice at 10: A Section 101 Update
PODCAST: Williams Mullen's Trending Now: An IP Podcast - IP and M&A Transactions
4 Tips for Protecting Your AI Products
Innovating with AI: Ensuring You Own Your Inventions
Director Review Under the USPTO's Final Rule – Patents: Post-Grant Podcast
AGG Talks: Cross-Border Business Podcast - Episode 20: Mastering ITC Section 337 Investigations
Navigating Intellectual Property Challenges in the Renewable Energy Sector - Energy Law Insights
Using Innovative Technology to Advance Trial Strategies | Episode 70
Patent Considerations in View of the Nearshoring Trends to the Americas
The Manual of Patent Examining Procedure (“MPEP”) is the examination manual used internally at the United States Patent & Trademark Office (“USPTO”) to guide examiners in the process of examining patent applications. In...more
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
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
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
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
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
It is abundantly clear that the Supreme Court's 2014 Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank decision has significantly changed the patent-eligibility landscape for business methods and some types of software inventions. For instance, in...more
The current U.S. Supreme Court has been noted for its hostility to patent holders in general, but the Supreme Court has been especially hostile to any sort of life sciences or software invention. The Court has attempted to...more
Of the three recognized judicial exceptions to Section 101—laws of nature, natural phenomena, and abstract ideas—none has proved more resistant to reasoned judicial analysis than the last. From its inception in Gottschalk v....more
Part III. Functionalism: A Philosophical Argument In Support Of The Functional Equivalence Of Mental Steps And Computer - Even if UDC did not support the Solicitor General’s argument that “the functions themselves are...more
The fictional form of the mental steps doctrine arose in Benson, where the Court stated: A digital computer, as distinguished from an analog computer, is that which operates on data expressed in digits, solving a problem...more
There are many ways to obtain intellectual property protection for software creations. Many keep the software code confidential and maintain the software as a trade secret....more