5 Key Takeaways | Alice at 10: A Section 101 Update
5 Key Takeaways | Rolling with the Legal Punches: Resetting Patent Strategy to Address Changes in the Law
4 Key Takeaways | Updates in Standard Essential Patent Licensing and Litigation
5 Key Takeaways | Hot Topics in Biopharma
Podcast: The Briefing - A Prototypical Corporate Salesperson is Not Patentable
[IP Hot Topics Podcast] Innovation Conversations: Andrei Iancu
Nota Bene Episode 99: Unpacking the Pendulum of American Patent Policy Then, Now, and Forward with Rob Masters
IP(DC) Podcast: Patent Battles – New Patent Initiatives on the Hill & Notable CAFC/SCOTUS Decisions
Podcast: Patentable Subject Matter in 2019
Compiling Successful IP Solutions for Software Developers
Drafting Software Patents In A Post-Alice World
The Federal Circuit recently issued a decision in Recentive Analytics, Inc. v. Fox Corp., invalidating the patent claims at issue as directed to ineligible subject matter under 35 U.S.C. § 101. In what it noted was a case of...more
This post is part of MoFo’s 2025 Intersection of AI and Life Sciences blog series. In this blog series, we explore how artificial intelligence is revolutionizing research, innovation, and patient care in the life sciences....more
At ACI’s 23rd Advanced Summit on Life Sciences Patents, you can expect informational overviews and thorough discussion of every facet of the industry. In a time of major legislative, regulatory, and judicial change, you can't...more
Patent eligibility under 35 U.S.C. § 101 remains one of the most hotly contested and unpredictable areas of U.S. patent law. In the years following the Supreme Court’s landmark decisions in Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank Int’l...more
The patent world tends to think that the Supreme Court’s framework in Alice is a template for determining the eligibility of software and business method inventions. Under 35 U.S.C. § 101, abstract ideas are not eligible for...more
While Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions, such as predictive AI, have been around for decades, generative AI systems are recent innovations with far reaching implications for patent law. Generative AI, such as ChatGPT,...more
It’s been 10 years since Alice was decided. Kilpatrick’s Steve Borgman and Andrew Saul recently presented at the 29th Annual Advanced Patent Law Institute in Austin, Texas, on recent cases and trends in the courts and the...more
The US Patent Office (USPTO) recently issued new guidance and three examples for AI-related patent claims, which indicate that claims applying AI to a process are unlikely to render the process patent-eligible at the USPTO...more
On July 16, 2024, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) released updated guidance on patent subject matter eligibility, focusing on artificial intelligence (AI). This update, effective from July 17, 2024, is...more
This article discusses the February 13, 2024 guidance issued by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) regarding the inventorship of artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted inventions. While this guidance marks a...more
Filing a continuation application from a parent patent is an implicit admission that obviousness-type double patenting (ODP) applies to the resulting continuation patent. A Terminal Disclaimer in the continuation patent over...more
Seeking to undo the current jurisprudence “mess” on the issue of patent eligibility, the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Intellectual Property heard testimony on January 23, 2024, on the Patent Eligibility...more
This case addresses whether patents relating to methods and systems for connecting users based on their answers to polling questions claim patentable subject matter under 35 U.S.C. § 101...more
Practitioners’ hopes (or fears) that the Supreme Court would clarify what constitutes patent-eligible subject matter under 35 U.S.C. § 101 were dashed in May when the Supreme Court denied certiorari in Interactive Wearables,...more
Through the vicissitudes of the continuing chaos of subject matter eligibility, Senators Coons and Tillis have been steadfast in attempting to provide a legislative solution. They chaired a series of Congressional hearings in...more
Kilpatrick Townsend’s Karam J. Saab recently joined a panel of other industry leaders at the The 21st Annual Rocky Mountain Intellectual Property Institute -- the premier forum for bringing together intellectual property...more
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) organizes its examining corps into technical centers (TCs). Each TC is dedicated to one or more general technical fields. In some cases, one TC may include two or more unrelated...more
In 2008, McDonald filed a patent application for methods and systems related to the display of primary and secondary search results in response to search queries. The examiner rejected McDonald’s original application as being...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
There is ample evidence that patent examiner allowance rates vary dramatically from examiner to examiner and art unit to art unit.[1] This has resulted in the general understanding that there are "easy" examiners and "tough"...more
In a ruling that should surprise absolutely nobody, the Federal Circuit rapidly scrapped an appeal of a PTAB decision that affirmed a 35 U.S.C. § 101 rejection of a business method claim. This is the latest in a series of...more
Kathi Vidal, Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (at right) released a blog post on the USPTO's Director's Blog on Monday addressing the fraught subject...more
In an order that is clearly less impactful and damaging than a number of opinions that the Supreme Court has disgorged in the last two weeks, the justices have denied certiorari in American Axle & Mfg. Inc. v. Neapco Holdings...more
On January 6, 2022, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office announced a new program with the goal of increasing examiner efficiency. The Deferred Subject Matter Eligibility Response (DSMER) Pilot Program will launch on February...more
Under the patent statute, any person who “invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof, may obtain a patent,” subject to the...more