31 January

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Brexit is Finally Happening: Here’s What to Expect for IP

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“One of the more controversial aspects of the Act is a provision providing that a government minister can (with consultation) provide for certain courts and tribunals not to be bound by EU case law.” The Withdrawal Agreement Act 2020 received Royal Assent on January 23 and was approved by the European Parliament on January 29. That means that the UK will leave the European Union at 11:00 pm GMT on January 31, 2020 and the EU will then have 27 rather than 28 Member States. The UK’s departure from the EU will in due course have a number of implications for intellectual property, in...

30 January

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Users Lament PAIR Changes During USPTO Forum

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“Down the chain you’re finding paralegals and assistants spending hours and hours per day to get basic information about patent applications,” said Chad Gilles of BigPatentData. “Due diligence can now be a four-hour project because Public PAIR is so overloaded.” Jamie Holcombe, Chief Information Officer at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), seemed surprised to learn on Wednesday that both the Public and Private versions of the USPTO’s Patent Application Information Retrieval (PAIR) System have serious issues that are making workflows untenable for users. Holcombe was participating in a public Forum on the PAIR system, where USPTO staff listened to stakeholders’ experiences since the Office implemented...

30 January

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IP That Works for All’: My Vision for the World Intellectual Property Organization

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Professor Adebambo Adewopo is one of 10 candidates to succeed Francis Gurry as Director General of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). The WIPO Coordination Committee will nominate one candidate on March 5 and 6, before he or she is formally appointed by the WIPO General Assembly. In the increasingly global environment, our creators, inventors and innovators have continued to lean on the shoulders of the of intellectual property (IP) system as the core of the emergent global knowledge economy and a guarantee for private reward and public welfare. The products of intellect have continued to face opportunities and challenges presented...

30 January

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PTAB Refuses to Apply SAS Institute on Remand as Ordered by Federal Circuit, Federal Circuit Denies Rehearing

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“Judge Newman argued that it was contrary to the America Invents Act, the mandate rule of the Administrative Procedure Act, and the USPTO’s own Office SAS Guidance for the PTAB to disregard the Federal Circuit’s remand order.” The Federal Circuit recently denied a petition by BioDelivery Sciences International, Inc. (BioDelivery) for a rehearing en banc following a refusal by the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) to apply the Supreme Court’s decision in SAS Institute Inc. v. Iancu, 138 S. Ct. 1348 (2018). See BioDelivery Scis. Int’l, Inc. v. Aquestive Therapeutics, Inc., Nos. 2019-1643, 2019-1644, 2019-1645, 2020 U.S. App. LEXIS 1030 (Fed. Cir. Jan. 13, 2020) (Before Prost, Chief...

29 January

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Time to Wake Up: Stakeholders Must Compromise to Save the U.S. Patent System

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Things are bad for many innovators and there is little hope for improvement on the foreseeable horizon. Despite the best efforts of Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) and Senator Chris Coons (D-DE), efforts to reform America’s patent system for the better have stalled to the point that the Senate IP Subcommittee is moving on from patent matters and will focus on copyright reform throughout 2020. “Given the reasonable concerns that have been expressed about the draft as well as the practical realities of the difficulty of passing legislation, absent stakeholder consensus I don’t see a path forward for producing a bill—much less...

29 January

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EU Trademark Owners Relieved by CJEU Judgment in SkyKick Case

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The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has provided reassurance to European trademark owners in its judgment today in the SkyKick case. (Case C?371/18 Sky plc, Sky International AG, Sky UK Limited v SkyKick UK Limited, SkyKick Inc.) The case involves questions referred from the UK in a dispute over SkyKick’s alleged infringement of five of Sky’s EU and UK national trademarks. Sky is a well-known broadcaster and telecoms services provider, and SkyKick is a cloud services provider. Clarity and Precision, and Bad Faith As is common in Europe, Sky’s registrations covered a large number of goods and services, some of them quite broad, such as...

29 January

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SMCA Set To Export U.S. Copyright Law to North American Neighbors

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The United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) was passed by the U.S. Senate on January 16, 2020 and will be signed by President Trump today. The treaty, which renegotiates and cancels the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), is expected to dramatically affect many areas of law of its three member states. With respect to copyright law, the USMCA largely exports copyright standards from the United States. Once it is implemented, content creators and owners, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and copyright professionals can expect the laws of Mexico and Canada to more closely resemble those of the United States with respect to...

28 January

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PTAB Holds Packet Filtering Claims Unpatentable in Cisco/Centripetal Networks IPR

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“[A] person of ordinary skill would have understood that in both the ‘713 patent and Sourcefire, the relevant data is located in the first packet of the message . . . [and] would have been sufficiently motivated by Sourcefire to design intrusion rules with the ssl_version keyword.” On January 23, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) issued a final written decision in IPR2018-01437 holding all claims (1-20) of U.S. Patent No. 9,160,713 B2 (the ‘713 patent) unpatentable. The ‘713 patent, owned by Centripetal Networks, Inc. (CN), was challenged in an inter partes review (IPR) by Cisco System, Inc. (Cisco). Packet Filtering Rules The ‘713 patent relates to filtering network data transfers....

28 January

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EPO Provides Reasoning for Rejecting Patent Applications Citing AI as Inventor | COFFYLAW, LLC

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Earlier this month, the European Patent Office (EPO) and the UK Intellectual Property Office (UKIPO) each rejected two patent applications that designated an artificial intelligence named DABUS as the inventor. While the UKIPO published a decision setting out its reasoning, the EPO simply stated at the time that the applications did “not meet the requirement of the European Patent Convention (EPC) that an inventor designated in the application has to be a human being, not a machine.” Now, the EPO has released more detail about the grounds for its decision. The applications at issue are for a “food container” (number EP3564144/ EP 18 275 163 )...

21 January

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Episode 15: Kevin Jakel of Unified Patents (Part 2)

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This episode is the second and final part of our interview with Kevin Jakel, the founder and CEO of Unified Patents. On this episode, we continue the conversation with Kevin about how Unified Patents operates, discuss Unified Patents’ new program for targeting Standard Essential Patents (SEPs), debate whether the patent troll narrative has been overblown, talk about the patent quality problem, and delve into some other patent policy issues related to IPRs and the PTAB. We also find out what Kevin has in common with George Costanza! ...

January 2020