Here is a report on recent news and commentary related to the Federal Circuit and its cases. Today’s report highlights:
- an article detailing how “[t]hree judges of the Federal Circuit wrestled at oral argument with whether a trial court properly prevented publication of a patent application . . .”;
- another article discussing the Federal Circuit’s affirmation of a “district court’s finding that a patent claim does not fail the written description requirement merely because the specification fails to explicitly state a negative claim limitation”;
- another article detailing how the Federal Circuit has considered whether “USPTO reexam estoppel orders [are] appealable”; and
- yet another article stating that the Federal Circuit would hear a case “that threatens the statutory presumption afforded copyright registration.”
Perry Cooper filed an article with Bloomberg Law discussing how, in Masimo Corporation v. True Wearables, Inc., “[t]hree judges of the Federal Circuit wrestled at oral argument with whether a trial court properly prevented publication of a patent application that allegedly disclosed a Masimo Corp. trade secret on noninvasive blood-content detectors.” Cooper noted that the “[t]rade secrets involved monitoring used in health trackers.”
Lexology published an article explaining how, in Novartis Pharmaceuticals v. Accord Healthcare Inc., the Federal Circuit “affirmed the district court’s finding that a patent claim does not fail the written description requirement merely because the specification fails to explicitly state a negative claim limitation.” The article highlighted that, “while cautioning that the Court did not intend to establish a new legal standard that silence is disclosure, the CAFC decided that the district court did not clearly err in finding the written description requirement satisfied.”
Britain Eakin authored an article for Law360 assessing how the Federal Circuit “mull[ed] if USPTO reexam estoppel orders [are] appealable.” Eakin explained that “[a] Federal Circuit panel . . . [questioned whether] August 2020 decisions by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office director that barred [a party] from seeking ex parte reexaminations of three Vivint Inc. patents it was accused of infringing should be subject to judicial review.”
Steven Tepp wrote an article for IPWatchdog stating that the Federal Circuit heard an oral argument “that threatens the statutory presumption afforded copyright registration.” More specifically, Tepp noted that, “[o]n January 13, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) [heard] oral argument in SAS Institute, Inc. v. World Programming, Ltd., a copyright infringement suit with far-reaching consequences for American creativity.”