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By Dennis Crouch Quality patent examination demands that patent examiners first identify the closest and most applicable prior art. To that end, the USPTO has spent many millions of dollars to ensure that examiners have fingertip-access to extensive databases of prior art literature. For patent documents, the USPTO maintains a ...

Jorge L. Contreras May 6, 2015 Prior to 2002, U.S. patent examiners were permitted to reject claims for obviousness based on “common knowledge and common sense of a person of ordinary skill in the art without any specific hint or suggestion in a particular reference.” But this practice was effectively ...

By Bernard Chao In its recent “Request for Comments on Enhancing Patent Quality,” the Patent Office specifically asked for proposals targeted at clarifying the public record. This paper responds to that request by following up on a recommendation that I made in the Patently-O Blog last year. Specifically, I suggested ...

A submission to the Berkeley Technical Law Journal In response to the USPTO’s Request for Comments on Enhancing Patent Quality Donald L. Champagne, Ph.D., P.E. The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine 4 May 2015 I have chosen the BTLJ’s format, which asks for a response to the following six ...

Apple is opposing an order by a federal magistrate judge to help the FBI unlock an iPhone belonging to one of the shooters of the San Bernardino attacks. A judge ordered the tech giant to break into the iPhone belonging to one of the San Bernardino shooters, Syed Rizwan Farook. ...

Those “who sweat in the clammy gymnasia of patent law” were impatiently waiting for the Alice decision. They thought they would get an answer to the question of whether or not software is patentable. In its June 19, 2014 ruling, the Supreme Court held that the patentability turned on a ...

Andrew Chin University of North Carolina School of Law Pillar 1, Proposal 2 relates to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s development of automated search tools for identifying potentially relevant prior art. The USPTO’s Scientific and Technical Information Center (STIC) currently uses a search tool called the Patent Linguistic Utility ...

In May 2015, Mylan Pharmaceuticals appealed to the Third Circuit after the lower court dismissed its case against Warner Chilcott, which was predicated on a practice called product-hopping. While we await the ruling which is due to come later this year, here is some background information on the developing area ...

USPTO Comments on Quality In February 2015, the USPTO published its Request for Comments on Enhancing Patent Quality. Over 100 responses were received from IP organizations, government agencies, academic and research institutions, law firms, companies, and individuals. BTLJ has summarized and organized each comment by “pillar,” presented below. The first ...

American Chemical Society (ACS) The American Chemical Society (ACS) supports Proposal 1 under Pillar 1 since it helps bring issues to the Office of Patent Quality Assurance as they arise during examination. It supports Proposal 5 under Pillar 3 because it allows applicants to resolve or reduce issues before costly ...