Source: https://www.iliplaw.com/americaisrael_patent_law/reissue/
Timestamp: 2019-04-19 09:13:00+00:00

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If You Add A Dependent Claim And No One’s There to Hear It, Does it Make Any Noise? – Part III: It Does, But Only if the Forest is in the U.S.A.
The Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences had ruled that since Tanaka did not assert a defective specification or drawing, his desired amendment did not give him the right to seek reissue of his patent under that prong of the statute, and that the case law held that failing to include a dependent claim did not constitute claiming more less than the patentee had a right to claim – after all, by definition a proposed dependent claim must fall within the scope of some already-existing claim, so the patentee could not be deemed to have claimed more or less than he was entitled to. Thus the BPAI left in place a strange situation in which a person who was only guilty of leaving out a dependent claim had no recourse, but if the patentee had really screwed up big time, for example by mislabeling a figure, making a mis-statement in a claim, or gaining allowance of a claim that encompassed the prior art, then that patentee could seek reissue on those grounds – and at the same time introduce new dependent claims as well.
Addressing a concern raised by Teva in an amicus brief, namely that “the public has an interest in preventing patentees from seeking reissue only to add narrower claims because such practice limits the public’s ability to rely on what is actually claimed in an issued patent”, the majority noted that 35 U.S.C. 252 gives courts equitable discretion to allow third parties who “prior to the grant of a reissue, made, pur­chased, offered to sell, or used within the United States, or imported into the United States, anything patented by the reissued patent, to continue the use of, to offer to sell, or to sell to others to be used, offered for sale, or sold, the specific thing so made, pur­chased, offered for sale, used, or imported unless the making, using, offering for sale, or selling of such thing infringes a valid claim of the reissued patent which was in the original patent.” Thus, presumably, if an originally issued broad claim could be shown to be infringed but invalid, and a narrower, infringed and valid claim was only added during reissue, a company that in the interim began to infringe the originally-granted broad claim, or that even merely made “substantial preparations” to do so, could seek equitable relief to continue its activities.
Judge Dyk dissented, arguing that not only was there was no CCPA or CAFC precedent directly on point, but that there was Supreme Court precedent (Gage v Herring, 107 U.S. 640 (1883)) that precluded reissue applications solely to add new dependent claims. The majority distinguish Gage on grounds that that decision was given under a very different reissue statute.
In the companion Israel case I discussed, Schwarz Pharma chose not to appeal the hearing officer’s ruling that a new dependent claim could not be added after an application had bee allowed, so overruling that decision will have to await another day.
In the previous post I discussed the issue of amending granted US patents to include new dependent claims. In this post I look at the same question with regard to Israel.
in which R and X- were each defined as being selected from a closed group of choices. The other independent claims were directed to methods for making such compounds or certain intermediates thereto. The active ingredient in Toviaz® is such a compound in which R is isopropyl and the counterion X- is fumarate, and having (R)-stereochemistry at the chiral carbon atom.
65. A patentee may request amendment [alternate translations: “correction” or “fixing”] of the specification of the patent for the sake of clarification or removal of an error that occurred therein or for the sake of reducing [alternate translations: “restricting”, “contracting”, “limiting”, “condensing”] his claims.
66. The Commissioner shall allow the amendment, if he is convinced that there is nothing therein to broaden the scope of the claims in the specification or to add to the specification things which were not in their essence mentioned therein a priori; notice of allowance of the amendment shall be published in Reshumot.
Teva opposed the amendment of claim 6 on the grounds that this amendment – in effect the addition of a new dependent claim – was not permissible under §65, as it did not fall into any of the three categories enumerated therein: clarification of the specification, correction of an error in the specification (which includes the claims), or for reducing the claims. Schwarz Pharma argued that since amended claim 6 did not broaden the scope of the claims, thus according with §66, the amendment should be allowed.
“Restriction of claims” means claiming a smaller portion of the scope of monopoly that was claimed in the context of a claim or set of claims as originally presented. There is nothing in new claim 6 to limit the scope of the monopoly claimed in claim 1 or in the set of claims 1-5; for when the [substantive] opposition to the grant of the patent is addressed, these claims will be addressed in full (as would also happen in a suit for infringement, if the patent is granted), and the scope of the monopoly claimed therein will be unaffected by the addition of new claim 6. This implies that there is nothing in new claim 6 to restrict what is claimed in the patent application in accordance with section 65 of the patent statute.
Section 65 cannot be understood as instructing other than that the applicant must act to restrict his claims, i.e. to reduce the monopoly originally claimed, and not to add alternative lines of defense in the guise of new dependent claims.
Thus, per the hearing officer’s decision, once an application has been published for opposition, there is no way for the applicant/patentee to introduce new dependent claims.
Although the hearing officer’s take on §65 is not implausible, it is not the only interpretation of the statute possible; that’s why, in translating §65 above, I included several alternate translations of the Hebrew term “tzimtzum”. The hearing officer understood the phrase to mean “restricting the scope of the patentee’s claims”, but in the context of §65, “tzimtzum” could merely mean reducing the number of the claims. Support for this view comes from the fact that the word “scope” (“hekef” in Hebrew) doesn’t appear in §65, but it does appear in §66: the Commissioner must ascertain that the amendment won’t broaden the scope of the claims. To read “scope” into §65 is therefore to render part of §66 redundant; but interpreting statutes to create redundancy therein is generally frowned upon. If, however, “tzimtzum” in §65 is understood to mean reducing the number of claims, then there is no redundancy between §65 and §66 – and applicants whose applications have been opposed, or patentees, would be free to add a number of new dependent claims commensurate with the number of claims they are willing to cancel.
The absolute bar on the introduction of dependent claims is at odds with the situation in the USA, which, as explained in the previous post, enables the addition of new dependent claims (1) in the context of reissue proceedings, if at the same time (a) the scope of one of the independent claims is also being restricted or broadened or (b) the specification is being corrected, and (2) in the context of reexamination proceedings. In the present case, had claim 1 been granted in the USA and had Schwarz Pharma sought reissue to limit claim 1 by excluding Cl- as X- and limiting R to isopropyl, as it did in Israel, then new claim 6 could have been introduced.
If the hearing officer’s decision is not overturned on appeal, the result will be that in most cases, applicants will only be able to obtain those dependent claims introduced during ex parte prosecution. To avoid this difficulty, in important cases applicants who can afford to do so should maintain the pendency of a divisional application. In the corresponding case in Europe, for example, the divisional EP 1690536 B1 claims crystalline fesoterodine fumarate as well as its use. However, the ILPTO in recent years has been making it difficult for applicants to delay examination of their applications; and as discussed in an earlier post, the Commissioner has (erroneously) taken the view that applicants cannot file divisionals of divisonals, which would be another obvious way to maintain pendency in the absence of an explicit continuation regime as in the USA.
Moreover, it’s not clear how the ILPTO would respond were an applicant to file a claim in a divisional that properly should have been included as a dependent claim in the parent case: the ILPTO might raise the Israeli equivalent of what in the US would be called a statutory double-patenting rejection. Although it’s my view that such an assertion would be incorrect, to the best of my knowledge the matter hasn’t yet been adjudicated.
NOTE: This is the first part of a two-part post. This part focuses on US practice; the second part will focus on Israel practice.
During ex parte patent practice in both the USA and Israel, applicants are free to amend their claims, so long as the amendments are supported by the specification. But what are a patentee’s options for amending the claims after grant?
In the USA, a patentee may seek a certificate of correction to rectify clerical or typographical errors (35 U.S.C. §254 and §255), but more substantive matters – like substantive patentability – may be dealt with through two types of proceedings, reexamination and reissue.
Reexamination (35 U.S.C. §§301-307 and §§311-318) can be thought of as a means for correcting a particular type of error by the USPTO: the failure to find and consider certain prior art publications during the examination of a now-issued patent. This is reflected in the fact that re-examination proceedings are predicated on the patentee or a third party presenting to the USPTO one or more printed prior art publications that raise a substantial new question of patentability regarding at least one of the claims of the patent. Unlike prosecution of a regular application, reexamination can only result in the allowance or rejection of each claim; continuations and divisionals cannot be filed in a reexam.
During reexamination, patentees may amend their claims. Although patentees may not broaden the scope of the claims during reexamination, they may add new dependent or even independent claims. Thus, for example, reexamination of US 6047319 resulted in all 17 originally-granted claims being upheld as allowable, and the addition of nine new claims, including a new independent claim 21 as well as claims 18-20 which depend from claim 1.
Reissue, in contrast, can be thought of as a means to correct patentee error in an issued patent. Unlike reexamination, only the patentee can request reissue. As set forth in the first paragraph 35 U.S.C. §251, reissue may be sought for two reasons: a defective specification or drawing, or claims that are overly broad or overly narrow.
As with reexamination, during reissue proceedings the applicant may amend its claims and add new ones. However, in contrast to reexamination, once reissue proceedings have begun, the applicant may file continuations and divisionals. And if the reissue application is filed within two years of the grant of the original patent, the patentee may seek to broaden his claims. Broadening, in this context, means amending or filing a claim that is in some way broader than the originally granted claims, even if the amended or new claim is in other ways narrower than the granted claims. In re Self, 671 F.2d 1344 (CCPA 1982).
An interesting question that is now before the CAFC is whether or not a patentee may seek reissuance of a patent when the only change sought is to add a new dependent claim. According to a memo circulated to the examining corps by then-Deputy Commission John Love in late 2007, as long as one of the two threshold criteria are met – defective specification or drawings, or overly broad/narrow claims – USPTO policy is that the patentee is entitled to seek reissue under the statute. But if the only the failure of the patent alleged by the patentee is the failure to include a dependent claim, that does not constitute “the patentee claiming more or less than he had a right to claim in the patent”, as per 35 U.S.C. §251, and thus the patentee is not entitled to seek reissue.
The result of the PTO’s position is that in cases where there is an error in the specification to which the patentee can point, he can use this to gain entry to the reissue process; once there, he may add dependent claims, without narrowing his already-granted independent claims. Exhibit A: the reissue of US 5945207, which resulted in Re 40005. In that case, the only amendment to the claims that the patentee sought to introduce was the addition of new dependent claims. Under the USPTO’s view, that alone would have been insufficient as a basis for reissue proceedings. But the patentee also sought to correct the units for saturation magnetization recited in the specification, from “kA/m” to “kAm2/kg” (compare col. 3, line 17 of the original patent with col. 3, line 21 of the reissued patent). That opened the door for the reissue process, enabling the patentee to add new dependent claims 8-14.
However, as set forth in a 2009 BPAI decision, Ex Parte Tanaka, in the case in which the patentee seeks only to introduce a new dependent claim, without amending the specification or otherwise amending any of the granted claims, the PTO will not allow the reissue to proceed. In that decision, the BPAI explained why it believes that CCPA and CAFC case law interpreting §251, including Hewlett-Packard Co. v Bausch & Lomb, Inc., 882 F.2d 1556 (Fed. Cir. 1989) and In re Handel, 312 F.2d 943 (CCPA 1963) does not allow reissue applications solely for the purpose of introducing new dependent claims. Inter alia, the Board was of the view that if failure to include dependent claims was an error correctable by reissue, “then virtually every patent could be reissued out of hand”. Tanaka is now on appeal before the CAFC; oral arguments are scheduled for January 10, 2011.
As a practical matter, it’s clear that there are several other ways Tanaka could have approached the situation and still managed to get his dependent claim allowed. He could have kept a continuation application pending; claim 16 would apparently have been allowed, pursuant to the filing of a terminal disclaimer. A riskier but viable approach would have been to find some prior art that raises a substantial new question of patentability and to request reexamination on that basis. That would have opened the door to adding new claims, assuming that the claims were allowable over the prior art that served as the basis for the reexamination request. And as mentioned above, he could have pointed to an error in the specification as the basis for reissue; that too would have opened the door for adding new claims.
Another possibility might have been to amend one of the allowed claims in a way that formally narrowed the claim, but without detriment to the commercial value of that claim. Such an approach was used in the reissue of US 6910617. There, the patentee originally sought to only add dependent claims, and was rejected for the same reason Tanaka’s reissue application was rejected. In response, the applicant amended the word “axial” in claim 1 to read “coaxial” (although he also found an error in the specification which also served as the basis for reissue). This narrowing amendment brought the application within the ambit of the §251, enabling the patentee to add independent claims (although he could have added dependent claims as well) and leading to the issuance of Re 41101.
Editorializing for a moment, it seems strange that if a patent has no apparent flaws except for the failure to include some additional dependent claims, the patentee has no recourse to get those additional dependent claims introduced. If, however, there are some flaws, e.g. the patentee made a mistake in the specification or drawings, or found some prior art that calls the validity of the claims into question, then that patentee is rewarded with an opportunity to file new dependent claims.

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