Here is a report on recent news and commentary related to the Federal Circuit and its cases. Today’s report highlights:
- an article reflecting on the first five months of the Federal Circuits’s precedential rulings in patent cases in 2024; and
- an article expressing the opinion that a new rule proposed by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office would seriously harm U.S. inventors.
Ted Mathias, Don Wang, Ramya Auroprem, and Darpan Singh authored an article for IPWatchdog reflecting on the first five months of Federal Circuit precedential rulings in patent cases in 2024. The article begins with discussion about the affects of the en banc court’s decision to overrule the Rosen-Durling test governing the non-obviousness requirement applied to design patents, concluding that the new decision in LKQ Corporation v. GM Global Technology Opperations LLC “lowers the standard for finding design patents obvious, which will significantly impact both the prosecution of and litigation on design patents.” The article also emphasizes how recent Federal Circuit decisions, such as Luv N’ Care, Ltd. v. Laurain, have “breathed new life” into the unclean hands and inequitable conduct equitable defenses.
Alyssa Caridis, Clement Roberts, and Irena Royzman filed an article with Bloomberg expressing their opinion that a new rule proposed by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office would seriously harm U.S. inventors. They say the new rule “calls for an inventor’s rights in one patent—voluntarily related to a different patent in terms of ownership and term—to be extinguished by an invalidity determination for any claim in the other patent.” The authors criticize it because, they say, it would “ease and expedite the ability for related patents to be stamped out en masse, without considering them on their merits.” The authors argue that the proposal “runs contrary to congressional intent and the realities of U.S. patent litigation” because it “incentivizes patent challengers to target the weakest claim in one patent to eliminate strong claims in another without having to prove that the strong claims are invalid.”