An en banc Federal Circuit held that in inter partes review proceedings, the petitioner — not the patent owner — bears the burden of proving that proposed amended claims are unpatentable, overturning years of PTAB practice that had effectively blocked most patent owner amendment efforts.
The Federal Circuit reversed summary judgment of non-infringement in a divided infringement case, holding that the ‘direction and control’ standard from Akamai v. Limelight could be satisfied where one party conditions participation in an activity on performance of a method step by anoth
The Federal Circuit granted mandamus to Cray and set forth a three-part test for what constitutes a ‘regular and established place of business’ under the patent venue statute — rejecting the Eastern District of Texas’s expansive four-factor test and clarifying that employees’
The Federal Circuit held that the federal government qualifies as a ‘person’ under the America Invents Act and may petition for covered business method (CBM) review at the PTAB — a ruling the Supreme Court reversed in 2019, holding that the government is not a ‘person’ for AI
Reversing a district court’s Section 101 dismissal, the Federal Circuit held that Visual Memory’s patent on a programmable memory system with processor-specific operational characteristics was directed to an improved computer memory technology — not an abstract idea — because it describe
The Federal Circuit held that IPR estoppel under § 315(e)(2) does not extend to prior art grounds based on patents or printed publications that the petitioner could not have raised in IPR — specifically that prior art systems and physical products (which cannot be raised in IPR) are not subject to t
The Supreme Court unanimously held that the Lanham Act’s prohibition on registering ‘disparaging’ trademarks violates the First Amendment — invalidating the PTO’s refusal to register THE SLANTS for an Asian-American band and establishing that trademark registration is a gover
The Supreme Court held 7-1 that authorized patent sales both domestically and abroad exhaust all U.S. patent rights in the sold item — eliminating Lexmark’s attempt to use conditional patent licenses to control post-sale use and the Federal Circuit’s rule allowing foreign sales to preser
The Supreme Court held that the patent venue statute, § 1400(b), is the sole provision governing where patent suits may be filed, and that a corporation ‘resides’ only in its state of incorporation for patent venue purposes.
The Federal Circuit held that a secret commercial sale — where the existence of the sale agreement was publicly disclosed but the details of the invention were kept confidential — triggers the on-sale bar under the AIA, finding that the America Invents Act did not change the rule that confidential s