Two cases decided recently by the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit discuss the oft-problematic area of 35 U.S.C. §103, or the nonobviousness requirement. This is the second case, Realtime Data, LLC v. Iancu,[1] decided January 10, 2019. Realtime Data, LLC, owns U.S. Patent No. 6,597,812 (‘812), directed to system and method of providing …
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Fed Circuit Watch: Opioid Addiction Drug Patent Not Obvious
On September 10, 2018, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit decided Orexo AB v. Actavis Elizabeth LLC,[1] in what turns out to be a fairly straightforward analysis of an obviousness case under 35 U.S.C. §103. The facts are as follows. Orexo owns U.S. Patent No. 8,940,330 (‘330), which describes opioid treatment generally, and …
Fed Circuit Watch: Broad Wins Latest CRISPR Court Battle
On September 10, 2018, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit decided Regents of the Univ. of Calif. v. Broad Inst., Inc.,[1] in the latest court battle in the CRISPR patent challenge pitting three of the nation’s largest research universities against each other. CRISPR, or “Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats,” is a family …
Fed Circuit Watch: Hyperlinked Material in Federal Register Notice is Prior Art
What constitutes prior art is not as easy as it may seem. While it may be uncontroverted that a Federal Register notice is prior art, the hyperlinked materials in that notice is what was at issue in Jazz Pharm., Inc. v. Amneal Pharm., Inc.,[1] decided by the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit on …
Fed Circuit Watch: No Challenge to Partial Institution Raises No SAS Issue
On June 7, 2018, the Court of Appeals for Federal Circuit handed down PGS Geophysical AS v. Iancu,[1] which has a tangential relationship to the WesternGeco LLC, of the recent WesternGeco LLC v. ION Geophysical Corp. [2] recently decided by the U.S. Supreme Court. This case is one of several transition cases pending with the …
Fed Circuit Watch: Motion-Tracking Patent Beats Obviousness Finding
This is the second of a trio of recent Federal Circuit precedential cases that have dealt with the law of obviousness that we will review for this blog. Here, in Elbit Systems of America, LLC v. Thales Visionix, Inc.,[1] the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit held that claims directed to a motion-tracking patent …
Fed Circuit Watch: Who Let the Cat Out? Faulty USPTO Obviousness Analysis
On February 9, 2018, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit handed down Polaris Indus., Inc. v. Arctic Cat, Inc.,[1] where a Fed Circuit panel criticized the invalidation of all 38 claims of Polaris’ patent as obvious under 35 U.S.C. §103 over different combinations of prior art based on the PTAB’s messy §103 analysis. …