Patent Trial and Appeal Board

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There are a number of requirements that must be met for an invention to be patentable. The invention must be novel (unique) and nonobvious (i.e., a person skilled in the field of the invention would not have found the invention obvious based on the existing knowledge in the field). In addition, the patent application must meet other requirements, including written description (the application must contain a detailed, clear, and definite written description of the invention) and enablement (the application must describe how to make and use the invention). If the patent application satisfies all of the requirements, a patent is issued.

A third party can challenge an issued patent on several different grounds, either in litigation or in the Patent and Trademark Office’s Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB). If the challenge is successful, some or all of the patent’s claims will be invalidated. If only some of the claims are invalidated, those claims will be canceled from the patent and the remaining claims will be enforceable.
Continue Reading IPRs Cannot Be Used to Challenge Patents for Indefiniteness

To be patentable, an invention must satisfy two key requirements, as determined by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO).  First, the invention must be novel.  This means that the same invention cannot have been disclosed in a single prior art reference.  The prior art is all of the publicly available information that existed before the date the patent application was filed.  Second, the invention must not have been obvious to a (hypothetical) person skilled in the art (the field of the invention) based on the prior art.
Continue Reading When is an Invention Obvious?

Some things are not patentable: laws of nature, natural phenomena, and abstract ideas.  The Supreme Court has long held that inventions falling within these categories are not patentable; they are patent-ineligible subject matter.  In 2014, the Supreme Court relied on this principle in deciding Alice Corp. Pty. Ltd. v. CLS Bank International, 134 S. Ct.

In Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe et al. v. Mylan Pharmaceuticals Inc. et al., the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit held that Native American tribal sovereign immunity does not apply in Inter Partes Review (“IPR”) proceedings at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (“PTAB”) arm of the USPTO.  In do so, the…