Here is a report on recent news and commentary related to the Federal Circuit and its cases. Today we highlight:
- an article suggesting the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s “plan for using AI at the agency to speed up the process of granting patents” expects artificial intelligence vendors “to be paid in exposure rather than cold hard cash”;
- a piece discussing how the Acting Director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office “has . . . held that patent owners eventually have the right to assume their patents won’t be challenged in inter partes reviews”;
- a report highlighting how “[a] coalition of tech, auto, and manufacturing companies” urged the Federal Circuit “to support a software company’s challenge to a Trump administration policy change at the US Patent and Trademark Office”; and
- a post examining how “predictive analytics firm Recentive” argues “the Federal Circuit’s decision to eliminate all patent protection for novel machine learning applications using established models . . . chills U.S. innovation [in] an incredibly important area of emerging technology.”
Brandon Vigiarolo authored an article for The Register suggesting the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s “plan for using AI at the agency to speed up the process of granting patents” expects artificial intelligence vendors “to be paid in exposure rather than cold hard cash.” According to Vigiarolo, in its recent Request for Information, the USPTO said “the selected vendor must be willing to receive consideration that is primarily non-monetary.”
Dani Kass penned a piece for Law360 discussing how the Acting Director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office “has . . . held that patent owners eventually have the right to assume their patents won’t be challenged in inter partes reviews.” According to Kass, Coke Morgan Stewart “has created a new process in which she decides all discretionary denial requests before the petitions make it into the hands of administrative patent judges.” Kass noted how, before Stewart’s rulings, “‘settled expectations’ had not been invoked to discretionarily deny an IPR, and the age of the patent wasn’t a deciding factor.”
Michael Shapiro wrote a report for Bloomberg Law highlighting how “[a] coalition of tech, auto, and manufacturing companies” urged the Federal Circuit “to support a software company’s challenge to a Trump administration policy change at the US Patent and Trademark Office.” Shapiro explained that the group targeted “PTO Director Coke Morgan Stewart’s reforms retroactively scrapping a safe-harbor policy implemented by her predecessor,” a change which “[increased] the difficulty to administratively attack the validity of patents.”
Steve Brachmann published a post on IP Watchdog examining how “predictive analytics firm Recentive” argues “the Federal Circuit’s decision to eliminate all patent protection for novel machine learning applications using established models . . . chills U.S. innovation [in] an incredibly important area of emerging technology.” Brachmann noted the ongoing concern for machine learning technologies has “been noted by Former USPTO Director Andrei Iancu and several Senators sponsoring legislation to reform Section 101 patent eligibility law.”