Source: http://techrights.org/2018/10/09/prior-art-searches/
Timestamp: 2019-04-22 08:33:35+00:00

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THE conundrum associated with prior art is an old one. How can one search and identify similar past work? By what terms? By which means? Literature? Internet? What if the terms used aren’t the same? This is why examiners tend to be domain experts. Many are doctors and professors. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) can attract quite a few of them, including the wife of the previous patent ‘chief’ at Patent Progress.
“Google is a private firm and it is itself a prolific patent applicant. That’s a potential conflict.”The principal issue at the USPTO isn’t prior art, however, but patent scope, judging by the number of US patents being ejected by the courts based on that criterion, e.g. 35 U.S.C. § 101. It’s a bit disappointing to see Google getting involved at patent offices in various capacities like searches, translations etc. Google is a private firm and it is itself a prolific patent applicant. That’s a potential conflict.
This is, as we’ve already explained over the weekend, the wrong ‘solution’ tacking the wrong ‘problem’. What we really need to explore is how to compel the USPTO to stop granting software patents that courts and sometimes inter partes reviews (IPRs) would invalidate anyway. How can examiners be made to realise that abstract patents are a thing of the past? The choice of the new Director isn’t helpful. He gives the examiners guidelines that limit their ability to reject abstract patents.
Last week, the Supreme Court denied certiorari to Regeneron Pharmaceuticals in its appeal of the Federal Circuit’s decision in Regeneron Pharmaceuticals v. Merus that affirmed the District Court’s decision that the claims of Regeneron’s patent-in-suit were unenforceable due to inequitable conduct in the patent’s procurement. In so doing the Court passed up the opportunity to consider whether the split panel’s decision was consistent with the Federal Circuit’s own inequitable conduct jurisprudence, most recently handed down en banc in Therasense, Inc. v. Becton, Dickinson and Co., 649 F.3d 1276 (Fed. Cir. 2011) (en banc). The Court also deigned not to consider for the first time in over 70 years a doctrine stemming directly from a trio of its own decisions (specifically, Hazel-Atlas Glass Co. v. Hartford-Empire Co., 322 U.S. 238, 250-51 (1944); Precision Instrument Mfg. Co. v. Auto. Maint. Mach. Co., 324 U.S. 806, 814 (1945); and Keystone Driller Co. v. General Excavator Co., 290 U.S. 240 (1933)). Under the circumstances it is prudent for patent practitioners (prosecutors as well as litigators) to consider the lessons of the Federal Circuit’s Regeneron decision.
The U.S. Patent Trial and Appeal Board has once again sided with Comcast in its intellectual property battle with TiVo, invalidating two more of the latter’s patents.
35 U.S.C. § 101 makes patents like these “fake” (enshrined as patents but not deserving this status). Fake patents or abstract patents surface in press releases all the time (examples from yesterday [1, 2] courtesy of OneTrust) and crushing them one by one would be expensive, not just time-consuming. It would be better if such patents never got granted in the first place.
In a split decision, the Federal Circuit affirmed the district court’s holding that the ZUP Board patent claims were invalid as obvious under § 103(a) because a person of ordinary skill in the art would have had a motivation to combine the prior art references in the method it claimed and further held that the district court properly evaluated ZUP’s evidence of secondary considerations. See KSR Int’l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 U.S. 398 (2007) and Graham v. John Deere Co., 383 U.S. 1 (1966).
The Federal Circuit agreed with the district court’s conclusion that the ZUP Board patent merely identified known elements from prior patents (food bindings, handles etc.) and combined them. Further, the Federal Circuit agreed with the district court that ZUP’s purpose in so combining (helping riders maneuver between positions by focusing on rider stability) had been a longstanding goal of the prior patents – a goal predictably shared by many inventors in the industry. The Federal Circuit further concluded that because ZUP presented only minimal evidence of secondary considerations, ZUP did not “overcome” the strong showing of obviousness established by application of the other three Graham factors to the facts of the case. Chief Judge Prost authored the majority opinion that was joined by Judge Lourie.

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