The Federal Circuit affirmed rejection of claims covering a computer-implemented system for identifying Social Security Disability Insurance eligibility, holding the claims were directed to an abstract mental process that humans perform through observation and evaluation.
The Federal Circuit affirmed that product-by-process claim language — which defines a product in terms of the process used to make it — does not impart patentable weight unless the claimed process produces a product that is structurally and functionally different from the prior art.
The Federal Circuit held that the reissue recapture doctrine bars an applicant from using a reissue application to reclaim claim scope that was deliberately surrendered during original prosecution to overcome a patent eligibility rejection under § 101.
The Federal Circuit held that the Patent Act requires inventors to be human beings, affirming the USPTO’s rejection of applications that named an artificial intelligence system called DABUS as the sole inventor.
The Federal Circuit affirmed an award of attorneys’ fees under the court’s inherent equitable powers, holding that a patent owner’s voluntary dismissal from one district followed immediately by refiling the same case in a different district constituted bad-faith forum shopping that warranted sanctio
The Federal Circuit held that Stanford University’s patents on detecting organ transplant rejection via donor cell-free DNA are ineligible under § 101, finding the claims directed to a natural phenomenon measured by conventional techniques.
The Federal Circuit affirmed denial of a preliminary injunction, holding that speculative harms and generalized customer concerns about potential future harm do not constitute the concrete evidence of irreparable injury required to support preliminary patent injunctive relief.
The Federal Circuit held that prior art references containing obvious transcription errors — mistakes that a skilled artisan would immediately recognize as misstatements — cannot be used to establish unpatentability, because the erroneous content does not accurately disclose the state of the art.
The Federal Circuit reversed the TTAB’s cancellation of Coca-Cola’s U.S. registrations for THUMS UP and LIMCA, holding that a petitioner seeking cancellation under Lanham Act § 14(3) must show actual consumer confusion or misrepresentation affecting the U.S. market — competitive injury a
The Federal Circuit vacated a $2.75 billion patent infringement judgment against Cisco, holding that the trial judge was disqualified from hearing the case after discovering his wife owned Cisco stock — placing the stock into a blind trust did not satisfy the federal recusal statute’s divestiture re