Here is a report on recent news and commentary related to the Federal Circuit and its cases. Today’s report highlights:
- a blog post discussing a recent Federal Circuit opinion addressing copyright law; and
- another blog post identifying “many improvements to [the] drafting and prosecuting of patent applications [that] can be made by both the applicants and examiners to provide more certainty to the validity of issued patents.”
Dennis Crouch authored a blog post discussing a recent Federal Circuit opinion regarding a copyright lawsuit between SAS Institute and World Programming. Crouch reported how the Federal Circuit “affirmed the lower court ruling that SAS failed to establish copyrightability of its claimed program elements.” Crouch further explained how, in his view, “[t]he case is properly seen as an extension of the Supreme Court’s decision in Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc.,” in which “the Court found that Google’s use of Java API naming conventions in its Android operating system was fair use under copyright law.” Crouch indicated that, while the Supreme Court “did not rule separately on whether the API was even copyrightable in the first place . . . the Federal Circuit squarely addressed the copyrightability question” in this case.
Robert Stoll authored another blog post identifying “many improvements to [the] drafting and prosecuting of patent applications [that] can be made by both the applicants and examiners to provide more certainty to the validity of issued patents.” According to Stoll, “if the patent community starts now to advance the patent examination process, we could significantly improve the strength of issued patents, enabling greater reliance and security for patent owners in making investments, reducing unnecessary litigation costs, and greatly diminishing the need for post grant procedures to review patent validity.”