Here is a report on recent news and commentary related to the Federal Circuit and its cases. Today’s report highlights:
- a report discussing the Federal Circuit’s refusal to consider a ruling addressing alleged venue manipulation;
- an article about a Federal Circuit opinion addressing alleged inequitable conduct in the procurement of a patent; and
- an article discussing difficulty in the application of the non-obviousness patentability requirement in the context of design patents.
Dani Kass for Law360 reported that “[t]he full Federal Circuit won’t reconsider a ruling that Judge Alan Albright’s decision to keep patent litigation against Samsung and LG in the Western District of Texas had allowed venue manipulation.” Kass highlighted that “[a] reevaluation of the Federal Circuit’s ruling could have had a huge impact, given that about a quarter of patent cases filed this year have been in his court.”
Blake Brittain authored an article for Reuters discussing how “[a] Pfizer unit’s win against Belcher Pharmaceuticals’ claims that its adrenaline shot Abboject infringed a Belcher adrenaline patent was upheld by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.” Brittain explained, citing Judge Reyna, that “Belcher’s patent was invalid because the company purposely omitted important information from its application that would have kept the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office from awarding the patent if it had had the information.”
Adam P. Samansky, Peter J. Cuomo, and Serge Subach filed an article with Lexology detailing the Federal Circuit’s recent decision in Campbell Soup Co. v. Gamon Plus, Inc. According to the authors, the opinion clarifies “how [patent law’s] objective indicia of nonobviousness should be applied to successful and praise-worthy soup can displays.” More specifically, they noted, “the Court recognized the difficulty of applying its standard to design patents” given that “a design patent will always have some significant unclaimed features when compared to its functional commercial embodiment.”