Here is a report on recent news and commentary related to the Federal Circuit and its cases. Today’s report covers a note on comments made by Federal Circuit Judge S. Jay Plager during recent oral arguments, a report on a recent Federal Circuit opinion related to the authority to issue certificates of correction of patents, and a preview of Monday’s oral arguments in Peter v. NantKwest.
Nadia Dreid of Law 360 highlighted comments by Federal Circuit Judge S. Jay Plager who, during oral arguments in Cardionet, LLC v. InfoBionic, Inc., stated that “[i]f the case is appealed before the parties have a chance to flesh out the record, judges can struggle to fully understand the matter when it comes to incredibly technical and complicated patents,” and that “[t]he solution . . . might be a law change that prevents suits over Section 101 of the Patent Act . . . to come up to the Federal Circuit without ‘at least requir[ing] some sort of record to come up with it.'”
Jan Wolfe, writing for Reuters, reported on the Federal Circuit’s ruling in Honeywell Int’l v. Arkema Inc., in which the Court held “that PTAB abused its discretion in blocking Honeywell from correcting a mistake in the ‘chain of priority’ listed in a patent on a compound used in air conditioning systems” because “[u]nder the relevant statute, authority to determine when a certificate of correction is appropriate is expressly delegated to the PTO’s director, not PTAB judges.”
At SCOTUSblog, Ronald Mann offered an argument preview for Peter v. NantKwest, a case in which the Supreme Court will “consider fee awards in litigation challenging denial of patent applications,” noting that while the Court “has been quite skeptical in recent decades of awards of attorney’s fees . . . it also on occasion is remarkably solicitous about the fiscal interests of federal agencies.” (Yesterday we posted our argument preview for this same case.)