Recently, in the pages of this blog, we reported on the dire predictions made at the IPO Annual Meeting here in Chicago of the “end of days” for patents. Win or Draw or Lose The purported culprits?  The PTAB and the America Invents Act’s newly enacted Inter Partes Review and Covered Business Method Review.  Well, allow me to retort,” to borrow a line from Samuel L. Jackson’s character in Pulp Fiction.
Continue Reading How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb: Response to IPO Panel on PTAB Proceedings

Last Tuesday, for the first time ever, the Federal Circuit reversed the PTAB in an IPR decision by, among other things, ratcheting back the “broadest reasonable construction” standard for claim construction by declaring the PTAB’s construction “unreasonable.”  Idea LightbulbThe Court said that, “[e]ven under the broadest reasonable interpretation, the board’s construction ‘cannot be divorced from the specification and the record evidence,’ and ‘must be consistent with the one that those skilled in the art would reach.’”  Microsoft v. Proxyconn, 2014-1542, -1543 (Fed. Cir. June 16, 2015) (“A construction that is ‘unreasonably broad’ and which does not ‘reasonably reflect the plain language and disclosure will not pass muster’”) (internal citations omitted).
Continue Reading Footnote on Claim Amendment More Interesting than Federal Circuit Holding?