Source: http://techrights.org/2018/02/19/
Timestamp: 2019-04-19 22:37:24+00:00

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THE progress made by the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) is commendable. The number of petitions keeps climbing and the number of patent invalidations proportionally rises.
This is hardly surprising. PTAB helps resolve patent disputes outside the court. It deals with legitimacy of granted patents rather than matters like venues, damages and so on. It typically deals with matters of obviousness — a subject recently covered by M. David Weingarten and Kevin D. Rodkey. If a company wishes to bring legal action against another, why shouldn’t the validity of the patent/s at hand be ascertained first? We already know that examiners don't always make the right decisions. PTAB just sort of ‘double-checks’ them.
Long story short, the high court agreed with PTAB. As usual (it agrees about 80% of the time — that is upon examining PTAB decisions). It is very reassuring that PTAB does not take granted patents for granted. No patents should be blindly assumed to be valid. Because many are not! We only find that out in the rare circumstances/cases of them being challenged in a lawsuit or by PTAB. It means that less than 1% are really looked at properly.
Somebody commented on the Patently-O blog the other day that a claim that is patent eligible under §101 can become patent ineligible simply by narrowing the claim to recite a specific function that is a purported abstract idea.
In an interesting decision issued last year, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board reversed the final rejection of claims 1-5 and 9 in U.S. Application No. 12/959,017. The claims at issue had been rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 101 as reciting patent ineligible subject matter in the form of an abstract idea, and under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) as being unpatentable over U.S. Patent No. 6,454,707 and U.S. Patent Application Publication Nos. US 2006/0226079 A1 and US 2009/0082684 A1. This post addresses the Board’s reversal of the § 101 rejection.
A PTAB reversal of § 101 rejection/s must always be a reversal of an examiner’s decision, i.e. they deal with a mere application rather than a patent (or just tentative grant). For them to reverse a rejection is pretty rare a thing although we have not seen statistics about this for a while. It might be interesting. “Currently, about 1-2% of applications go up for appeal,” Anticipat wrote 3 days ago, but that speaks of applications alone, not patents.
It has always been like that. They don’t just pick applications/patents at random; they target those which are more questionable and have more at stake in the outcome (enough to merit a payment for a petition).
The other day in relation to Smith & Nephew, Covidien v. Hologic got brought up again. And also in relation to Smith & Nephew, PTAB was mentioned by Kevin E. Noonan, noting Judge Newman's typical dissent in Arthrex (another Federal Circuit case).
Although having built up a track record for several years and several thousand petitions and “trials,” inter partes review proceedings under the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act are still relatively new. As a statute administered by an administrative agency having the power (and duty) to promulgate rules effecting implementation of that statute, IPRs, like many administrative proceedings, have in due course generated controversies on how the statute has been implemented.
The Federal Circuit affirmed, in an opinion by Judge Dyk joined by Judge O’Malley (who filed a concurring opinion) over a dissent by Judge Newman. The panel first held that the Board’s decision was appealable, not falling within the proscriptions of 35 U.S.C. § 314(d) regarding institution decisions. The panel majority started from the presumption that PTAB decisions were appealable as for any other final administrative agency action. 5 U.S.C. §§ 701,704. The panel also found support in 28 U.S.C. § 1295(a)(4)(A), which provides for judicial review of final agency action absent statutory provisions precluding review. The Board did not find the Court’s decision in St. Jude Medical, Cardiology Division, Inc. v. Volcano Corp., 749 F.3d 1373 (Fed. Cir. 2014), to be to the contrary, based on the different procedural posture in that case (which considered whether § 1295(a)(4)(A) permitted appeal of the PTAB’s decision not to institute, which is precluded by § 314(d)).
Judge Newman’s dissent is based on her opinion that Arthrex had disclaimed all claims challenged in the petition prior to the Board’s decision whether to institute an IPR, and accordingly under 37 C.F.R. § 42.107(e) there were no claims against which an adverse judgment could be entered. For Judge Newman, the relevant language of 37 C.F.R. § 42.73(b) in subparagraph (2) is that “[c]ancellation or disclaimer of a claim such that the party has no remaining claim in the trial” (emphasis in opinion), because under the factual circumstances at bar there was no trial and thus entering an adverse judgment was contrary to the express language of the rule. Judge Newman believes that the PTAB has exceeded its statutory authority, and it is “[t]he judicial obligation is to assure agency compliance with its legislated authority,” citing Nat’l Broad. Co. v. United States, 319 U.S. 190, 224 (1943). For Judge Newman, “[s]ubsection (b)(2) on its face is directed to disclaimer or cancellation ‘in the trial.’ It is not disputed that ‘in the trial’ can occur only after institution.” Thus, because claims 1-9 were disclaimed before the IPR was instituted, it is a misapplication of the rule for the Board to have entered an adverse judgment. Any other interpretation is for Judge Newman an explicit change in the rule, which requires rulemaking procedures specified under the APA (35 U.S.C. § 2(b)(2)(B)).
Here’s an attempt to apply Section 101 to something which is not software but a doorbell. Wrong test to apply. As we wrote several times last year, this particular lawsuit was not about software patents, so the following outcome is not surprising.
The court denied defendant’s motion to dismiss on the ground that plaintiff’s audio-video doorbell patent encompassed unpatentable subject matter because the asserted claims were not directed toward an abstract idea.
The PTAB’s finding that an element in a prior art reference is “similar to” a claim limitation, without further explanation, is insufficient to support a finding of anticipation.
The Examiner also construed the claimed term “signal,” and determined this term was disclosed by Reference B. The PTAB affirmed.
The Federal Circuit reversed the Board’s anticipation rulings, and vacated the Board’s obviousness ruling. The Federal Circuit determined that the only correct interpretation of Reference A is that the inlet seat in the unlabeled valve is external to the outer casing of the drain valve.
ALL SORTS of USPTO-granted software patents are facing extinction. We’ll soon write about PTAB, giving some examples of invalidations, but one need not look as far as PTAB.
“The reason we wrote about these 4 times already is that falsehoods are being propagated and these need to be rebutted.”The computer is irrelevant to it. Algorithms are algorithms and they’re abstract. The above clearly misframes what Section 101/Alice is about (by lumping that together with hardware). In the meantime, there’s also similar spin from other law firms. As we last noted yesterday, they habitually distort and misframe Berkheimer, making it about Section 101/Alice even though that’s now quite the case. Yesterday we also wrote about Aatrix, a newer case which is already being distorted similarly. The reason we wrote about these 4 times already is that falsehoods are being propagated and these need to be rebutted.
Considering the patent-eligibility of claims directed to archiving digital assets, the Federal Circuit has affirmed a district court decision invalidating an independent claim under 35 USC § 101 and Alice, while vacating and remanding a judgment that certain dependent claims were patent-ineligible. Berkheimer v. HP, Inc., No. 2017-1437 (Fed. Cir. Feb 8, 2017) (precedential) (opinion by Judge Moore, joined by Judges Taranto and Stoll). Along the way, the court chastised the District Court for using independent claim 1 of US Patent No. 7,447,713 as representative, while ignoring the patent owner’s separate arguments concerning dependent claims 4-7.
They are partly correct in pointing out what many patent zealots intentionally omit; the Federal Circuit did not repudiate Section 101/Alice at all; au contraire. But some quote miners cherry-picked quotes from that long (almost 20 pages) decision to suit the bogus narrative of PTAB disregarding facts.
Obviously. But what does not follow is the remainder of this dross about Alice being controversial, unclear, or whatever.
THE patent trolls epidemic is no longer just a US-centric epidemic; China is feeling it too, having tactlessly embraced patent maximalism (in itself an epidemic of the mind) like the USPTO did.
It’s not hard to tell what a patent troll is; it’s usually obvious if some entity has some services/products. Entities that are practicing have things to show. They advertise these as they attempt to make sales, transactions etc.

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