The Federal Circuit upheld SRI’s network intrusion detection patents against a § 101 challenge, holding that claims requiring computers to perform surveillance and analysis that the human mind is incapable of doing are not directed to abstract ideas.
The Federal Circuit reversed a district court’s ruling that patents on using beta-alanine as a dietary supplement were invalid under § 101, holding that method of treatment claims covering use of a natural compound in non-naturally-occurring quantities to alter physiology are patent eligible.
The Federal Circuit invalidated a diagnostic patent for detecting autoantibodies linked to myasthenia gravis, then denied en banc rehearing in a rare decision accompanied by eight separate opinions, exposing the court’s deep division over § 101 and diagnostic patents.
The Federal Circuit held that the USPTO cannot reduce patent term adjustment by a period during which the applicant could not have taken any action to advance prosecution, limiting PTA deductions to periods of actual applicant delay.
The Federal Circuit held that Trading Technologies’ patents on a graphical user interface for electronic futures trading were patent-ineligible abstract ideas under Alice — finding that displaying market data and allowing traders to place orders by clicking on a price ladder represented an abs
The Federal Circuit held that the judicially created doctrine of obviousness-type double patenting cannot be used to cut short a patent term extension lawfully granted by statute, affirming Novartis’s extended patent protection for its multiple sclerosis drug Gilenya.
The Federal Circuit reversed a district court’s dismissal and held that a patent claiming a method of preventing computers from running unlicensed software by using the BIOS to store a license verification key is not an abstract idea—it claims a concrete improvement to computer security functionalit
The Federal Circuit held that a trademark registration creates a presumption of secondary meaning only as of the date of registration — not retroactively — requiring Converse to independently prove its Chuck Taylor trade dress had acquired distinctiveness before each infringer’s first infringing use
The Federal Circuit reversed invalidation of tabbed-spreadsheet navigation patents, holding that claims covering a specific, novel user interface for navigating large spreadsheets are not directed to an abstract idea.
The Federal Circuit reversed a district court’s summary judgment finding written description inadequacy for Nevro’s spinal cord stimulation patents, holding that the specification’s disclosure of the claimed frequency ranges combined with paresthesia-free stimulation raised genuine