Source: https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2019/03/14/uspto-pop-makes-first-attempt-streamline-ptab-policy/id=107351/
Timestamp: 2019-04-24 22:23:07+00:00

Document:
In September 2018, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) announced the substantial revision of Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) for the paneling of matters before the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) (SOP1) and precedential and informative decisions (SOP2), based upon feedback the Office received from stakeholders, courts, legislators, and six years of experience with America Invents Act (AIA) trial proceedings.
Now, the USPTO’s Precedential Opinion Panel (POP)—which includes USPTO Director Andrei Iancu, Commissioner for Patents Drew Hirshfeld, and Acting Chief Administrative Patent Judge Scott Boalick—has issued its first ever decision, holding that a petitioner may be joined to a proceeding in which it is already a party; that the Board has discretion to allow joinder of new issues in an existing proceeding; and that the existence of a time bar under 35 U.S.C. § 315(b) is one of several factors to consider when exercising this discretion.
The petition at hand, Proppant Express Investments, LLC and Proppant Express Solutions, LLC v. Oren Technologies, LLC (IPR2018-00914), sought rehearing of the PTAB’s November 2018 order denying Proppant’s Motion for Joinder to institute an IPR on claim 4 of U.S. Patent No. 9,511,929 B2. Proppant was requesting to be joined to a separate IPR to which it was a party that had been instituted on other grounds.
However, the POP said that the Board will exercise this discretion only in limited circumstances and will “consider gamesmanship attempts by either party to a proceeding” as part of that analysis.
As to the question of raising new issues in a request for joinder, the POP said that the statutory language includes “no express prohibition” against it.
Section 311 specifies that a petition may request an inter partes review only on grounds “raised under section 102 or 103 and only on the basis of prior art consisting of patents or printed publications,” but otherwise does not limit the issues that can be raised. 35 U.S.C. § 311(b). Thus, by referencing § 311 in §315(c), Congress allowed a petition accompanying a request for joinder to raise any grounds under §102 or § 103 on the basis of patents or printed publications. If Congress had wanted to limit the scope of a petition accompanying a joinder request to only those issues raised in the existing proceeding to which joinder is sought, it could have included such a limitation in § 315(c). Tellingly, it did not.
Again, the POP included a disclaimer at the start of its analysis on this question indicating that such discretion will only be applied in limited circumstances.
On the final question of a time bar, the POP explained that the bar applies only to the filing of a petition, and not to a request for joinder.
Ultimately, the POP declined to exercise its discretion as elaborated in the decision because the petitioner, Proppant, was requesting joinder as a result of its own errors—namely, to correct an error for claim 4.
“If the POP is going to come out with decisions that essentially say “maybe” or “you can but only sometimes and at the discretion of the Board” what is the point of a POP? The point of the POP was ostensibly to create uniformity across all panels of the PTAB. A decision like this will do nothing to create uniformity. It leaves each judge and panel to their own devices to interpret what ‘limited circumstances’ justify joining parties and issues.

References: § 315
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