Here is a report on recent news and commentary related to the Federal Circuit and its cases. Today’s report highlights:
- an article addressing some of “the biggest patent decisions so far this year”;
- another article discussing how the Federal Circuit found that an “[a]ttorney improperly represented clients while [he was a] Navy employee”; and
- a blog post noting how “[i]n a new opinion the [Federal Circuit] asked and answered an interesting question: What if most on-point prior art was accidentally created due to a typographical error?”
Dani Kass published an article for Law360 addressing how, “[i]n the first half of 2022, the Federal Circuit made key rulings tying induced infringement to willfulness and expanding the scope of estoppel in the America Invents Act, both while wiping a series of high-dollar verdicts.” Kass discussed how the Federal Circuit’s decision in Roche Diagnostics Corp. v. Meso Scale Diagnostics, LLC “grabbed attorneys’ attention for the way it handled induced infringement and willfulness.” Kass also discussed how, in California Institute of Technology v. Broadcom Ltd., the Federal Circuit “threw out a $1.1 billion verdict the California Institute of Technology had won against Apple.” Kass noted that “the decision stands out for its broadening of what arguments are prevented in district court litigation following a Patent Trial and Appeal Board review.”
Samantha Handler wrote an article for Bloomberg Law discussing how, in Corell v. Vidal, “[a] Navy engineer who also served as an attorney for private clients before the US Patent and Trademark Office failed to convince the Federal Circuit that his First Amendment rights were violated when the agency temporarily banned his legal practice.” As discussed in the article, the Federal Circuit ruled that “[t]he government’s interest in avoiding the appearance of impropriety outweighs the burden that the suspension has on Cordell,” the petitioner. The article notes that, “[r]egardless of whether the office’s discipline order violated Correll’s right to free speech—which the Federal Circuit found it didn’t—Correll agreed to follow conflict-of-interest rules when he signed the agency’s oath to practice.”
Dennis Crouch authored a blog post for PatentlyO noting how, in LG Electronics Inc. v. ImmerVision, Inc., the Federal Circuit “sided with the patentee in holding that a person of skill in the art would have ‘disregarded or corrected’ the [typographical] error rather than relying on the error as the foundation of an inventive project.” Crouch emphasized how “[a] key to the analysis was a finding that the error would have been apparent to someone of skill in the art.”