Monday 15 December 2014

What’s Trending in Patents? Commil v Cisco, Hospira v Genentech, Amending in IPR, Alice and Claim Breadth, DDR Holdings


1. Commil v Cisco was granted cert by the US Supreme Court which will now decide on whether a defendant’s belief that a patent is invalid as a defence to inducing infringement. The ‘Written Description’ blog comments on this here.

2. IEEE Spectrum’s yearly roundup of the strongest US patent portfolios can be found here. Johnson & Johnson continues to dominate the biotech and pharma fields. IEEE Spectrum’s very sophisticated ranking system is discussed here. An unrelated article on Patent Rating Systems by AcclaimIP can be found here.

3. See our post on the UK decision Hospira v Genentech on the PatLit blog here. This has an interesting discussion of ‘product by process’ claims which is further discussed on IPKat here.

4. Amending claims during IPR proceedings before the PTAB is proving to be difficult. PatentDocs discusses it here. Jones Day discusses it here.

5. From Electronic Frontier Foundation news about a Defensive Patent Licence (see here). Our own thoughts on rethinking the patent system here.

6. Is the Alice test becoming a way of judging claim breadth? PatentDocs looking at Ultramercial v Hulu believe so (see here). See also Pearl Cohen here, and EquityNet here.

7. DDR Holdings v Hotels is the decision that upheld a computer-implemented invention patent. Patently O here and here, PatLit here, IPWatchdog here. According to Judge Chen this was patentable because the claims “do not merely recite the performance of some business practice known from the pre-Internet world along with the requirement to perform it on the Internet. Instead, the claimed solution is necessarily rooted in computer technology in order to overcome a problem specifically arising in the realm of computer networks.”

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