Mauriel Kapouytian Woods has completed our merger with Maschoff Brennan, effective January 1, 2024. The formal name of this new intellectual property and technology law firm is Maschoff Brennan Gilmore Israelsen & Mauriel (dba Maschoff Brennan). We invite our clients and friends to learn more about our expanded capabilities and the strategic opportunities provided by our new firm.
In a case that discusses both some of the differences and similarities between design patents and utility patents, the Federal Circuit rejected a patent challenger’s argument that the aesthetic appeal of a patented design – as opposed to a mechanical or utilitarian aspect of the design – is functional. Automotive Body Parts Association v. Ford Global Technologies LLC (Fed. Cir. July 23, 2019).
Patent infringement cases can be complex, technical, and time-consuming for both parties and the courts that must resolve them. Many districts have special rules that attempt to impose order on what can be unruly cases, by specifying the timing and sequence of infringement and invalidity contentions, and claim construction procedures, among others.
The Federal Circuit ruled in Regents of the University of Minnesota v. LSI Corp., 2019 U.S. App. LEXIS 17887 (Fed. Cir. June 14, 2019), that state sovereign immunity does not bar an IPR proceeding against patents owned by a state university.
A “Laser Imaging Detection and Ranging” (LiDAR) device is a critical sensor for many autonomous driving solutions. In Quanergy v. Velodyne, IPR2018-00255 (PTAB, May 23, 2019), one of Velodyne’s LiDAR patents survived the invalidity challenge mounted by its rival Quanergy. The IPR petition in this matter was filed prior to the USPTO’s recent implementation of the Phillips claim interpretation standard for IPRs. Nevertheless, even under the “broadest reasonable interpretation” standard, the PTAB found that the intrinsic evidence sufficiently limited the scope of the term “LiDAR” to allow the patentee to effectively distinguish the prior art.
On June 24, 2019, the Supreme Court held in Iancu v. Brunetti that the Lanham Act’s prohibition on registering immoral or scandalous marks (15 U.S.C. §1052(a)) violates the First Amendment.
For the second time in two years, the Federal Circuit has held claims in Cleveland Clinic’s patents invalid for claiming ineligible subject matter. The patents at issue in Cleveland Clinic Found. v. True Health Diagnostics LLC, 2019 U.S. App. LEXIS 9451 (Fed. Cir. Apr. 1, 2019) (“Cleveland Clinic II”), were linked to the same natural law as the three patents at issue in Cleveland Clinic Found. v. True Health Diagnostics LLC, 859 F.3d 1352 (Fed. Cir. 2017) (“Cleveland Clinic I”): the correlation between cardiovascular disease and levels of the heme protein myeloperoxidase (“MPO”) in a subject’s blood.
Another week….another split Federal Circuit decision on 35 U.S.C. Section 101. This time, in SRI Int’l, Inc. v. Cisco Sys., 2019 U.S. App. LEXIS 8249 (Fed. Cir. March 20, 2019), a divided panel held a network security patent eligible under Alice Step 1. This case highlights the difficulties in resolving one of the major threads in the post-Alice caselaw: the level of specificity that Section 101 requires.
On March 4, 2019, the Supreme Court issued two unanimous decisions of interest to copyright practitioners. In both cases, the Court resolved a split among the Circuit courts and repudiated Ninth Circuit positions.
In Athena Diagnostics, Inc. v. Mayo Collaborative Servs., LLC, 2019 U.S. App. LEXIS 3645 (Fed. Cir. Feb. 6, 2019), the Federal Circuit issued another fractured decision applying 35 U.S.C. Section 101. Athena is the court’s eighth 2-1 decision in the Section 101 arena in the past year-and-a-half.
The Federal Circuit issued a decision on February 1st in Prism Techs. LLC v. Sprint Spectrum L.P., 2019 U.S. App. LEXIS 3281 (Fed. Cir. Feb. 1, 2019), that reads like a primer on civil procedure. The case is noteworthy because it presents a thicket of procedural issues that would be worthy of any Civil Procedure exam. It also is an example of the Federal Circuit’s reluctance to definitively articulate how Iqbal and Twombly have impacted federal pleading standards in patent cases.