Inter Partes Review / IPR

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Update (Jan. 13, 2017): The Delaware district court issued a short order on Jan. 11, 2017, maintaining the court’s earlier decision discussed in the post below.

An AIA trial is a relatively-inexpensive, partial substitute for challenging the validity of a patent. Yet, prospective AIA trial petitioners routinely struggle with the potential estoppel effect of not raising prior art before the Patent Trial and Appeal Board. Petitioners concerned about that issue may be encouraged by a recent Delaware district court decision interpreting the statutory estoppel provision and a 2016 Federal Circuit decision not to prevent an AIA trial petitioner from pursuing in court an invalidity argument based on prior art that the petitioner did not raise—but one might have thought reasonably could have raised—during the concluded AIA trial of the same patent-in-suit. The decision appears to render null an important phrase in that statutory provision. Intellectual Ventures I LLC v. Toshiba Corp., Civil Action No. 13-453, Slip Op. (DN 559) at 25–27 (D. Del. Dec. 19, 2016) (Memorandum Opinion).
Continue Reading District Court Interprets the IPR Estoppel Provision Narrowly

Red seal and imprint "SANCTIONS" on white surface

On November 10, 2016, the Intellectual Property Owners Association (IPO) hosted a panel discussion entitled Ethics in AIA Post-Grant Proceedings at the PTAB with the Honorable Thomas Giannetti, Lead Administrative Patent Judge of the PTAB.

The main topic of the discussion was guidance on motions for sanctions.  The rules relating to trial practice before the PTAB allow the Board to impose an appropriate sanction on any attorney, registered practitioner or party that violates the PTAB’s rules after the offending party has had an opportunity to respond.  35 C.F.R. §42.11(d)(1).  The Board has the authority to sanction parties or a party may file a motion for the Board to impose sanctions. 
Continue Reading Guidance on Requesting Motions for Sanctions

businessman between a rock and a hard space

The Federal Circuit has once again vacated and remanded a PTAB final written decision on the basis that the PTAB did not adequately explain its reasons for finding a claimed invention obvious.  In In re Nuvasive, Appeal No. 15-1670 (Fed. Cir. Dec. 7, 2016), the Federal Circuit reviewed the PTAB’s final written decision in IPR2013-00506 that concluded various claims of  NuVasive, Inc’s U.S. Patent No. 8,361,156 were invalid as obvious over a combination of prior art references.  The patent claims spinal fusion implants, and were challenged by Medtronic Inc.
Continue Reading Federal Circuit to PTAB (Again) – Explain Yourself!!

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Update: The Supreme Court issued a decision on April 20, 2020  holding that the patent statute (35 U.S.C. § 314(d)) bars judicial review of a PTAB decision of whether an inter partes review petition is time-barred pursuant to 35 USC 315(b). As stated by the Court, the PTAB’s “application of §315(b)’s time limit, we hold, is closely related to its decision whether to institute inter partes review and is therefore rendered nonappealable by§314(d).”

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On January 19, 2018, the Federal Circuit issued an order vacating the decision discussed in the post below and reinstating the appeal for reconsideration in view of the court’s en banc decision in Wi-Fi One LLC v. Broadcom Corporation, which we discuss here. A new decision on the merits may be expected later in 2018.

Original Post: In Click-to-Call Techs. v. Oracle Corp., Appeal 15-1242 (Fed. Cir. Nov. 17, 2016) (non-prec.), on remand from the Supreme Court for further consideration in view of Cuozzo Speed Technologies, LLC v. Lee, 136 S. Ct. 2131 (2016) (as we discussed here), the Federal Circuit again dismissed the patent owner’s (Click-to-Call’s) appeal, concluding that the court lacks jurisdiction to review a decision by the PTAB to institute an Inter Partes Review (IPR) petition over a patent owner’s objections that the IPR petition is time barred.
Continue Reading Federal Circuit Dismisses Appeal Based on AIA Time Bar, But Two Judges Call for En Banc Review

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An updated discussion of this issue is available here: Supreme Court Decides that IPR Final Decisions Must Address All Challenged Claims

The Federal Circuit recently denied a petition for rehearing en banc, effectively reiterating that the PTAB may, in its sole discretion, choose to institute an IPR proceeding on some, but not all, of the patent claims challenged in an IPR petition.  The rehearing petition sought the full court’s review of a split three-judge panel decision in SAS Institute, Inc. v. Complementsoft, LLC, Nos. 2015-1346, -1347 (Fed. Cir. Jun. 10, 2016), that applied Synopsys, Inc. v. Mentor Graphics Corp., 814 F.3d 1309 (Fed. Cir. 2016), to conclude that there is no statutory requirement that a PTAB final written decision address every claim raised in an IPR petition.
Continue Reading PTAB May Institute an IPR Proceeding on a Subset of Challenged Claims

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A split panel of the Federal Circuit held that the PTAB applied a standard that was too exacting when it required an inventor to prove the “continuous exercise of reasonable diligence” to antedate a prior art reference. Rather, the PTAB should have applied the rule of reason to determine if the inventor proved that there was “reasonably continuous diligence.” Perfect Surgical Techniques v. Olympus America, Inc., Case No. 2015-2043, __ F.3d __ (Fed. Cir. Nov. 15, 2016). This clarified standard appears to ease the burden on a party seeking to prove diligence.
Continue Reading To Antedate, Must an Inventor Prove “Continuous Reasonable Diligence” or “Reasonably Continuous Diligence”?

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Neither the Federal Circuit nor the PTAB has provided much guidance concerning the proper application of the one-year time-bar for filing IPRs when privity is alleged.  Recently, however, in AM General LLC v. UUSI, LLC, Case IPR2016-01049, Paper 14 (PTAB November 7, 2016), the PTAB has provided some guidance.

On May 18, 2016, Petitioner AM General LLC filed a Petition requesting inter partes review of various claims of U.S. Patent No. 5,570,666 (“the ‘666 Patent”).  In its Preliminary Response to the Petition, filed on August 19, 2016, the Patent Owner, UUSI, LLC, urged denial of the Petition, contending the petition was time barred. 
Continue Reading Petitioner Not Time-Barred By Service of COFC Complaint

In IPR2015-01191, American MegaTrends and four other petitioners challenged claims 1-9, 11, 12 and 15 of USPN 6,892,304 owned by Kinglite Holdings, Inc. on grounds of obviousness over three technical documents, supplemented by a fourth document for the challenge to claim 6.  The parties also indicated that they were involved in 11 other IPR petitions and two district court proceedings.

The technology disclosed and claimed in the ‘304 patent involved methods of encrypting instructions to the Basic Input-Output System (BIOS) of a computer operating system using a private-public key pair.
Continue Reading It Isn’t Printed Publication Art Unless It’s Publicly Accessible

Deflated basketball against white background.

In Schoeller Bleckmann Oilfield v. Churchill Drilling Tools U.S., No. 2016-1494 (Fed. Cir. November 9, 2016) (non-prec.), the court affirmed the Board’s IPR decision of unpatentability of claims directed to oil-drilling equipment.  The court refused to construe the challenged claims as limited to a disclosed embodiment, rejecting the patentee’s argument that the claim term “ball-like” was given an implicit definition in the specification.
Continue Reading Federal Circuit Affirms Board’s Decision Cancelling Claims for Oil Drilling Equipment Based on Broad Claim Construction

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The Federal Circuit reversed, in part, a PTAB final written decision after determining that several emails, wrongly excluded as hearsay, showed the inventor’s conception prior to allegedly anticipating art.  In REG Synthetic Fuels, LLC v. Neste Oil Oyj,  No. 2015-1773 (Fed. Cir. Nov. 18, 2016), the Federal Circuit reversed the PTAB’s finding that a prior art reference anticipated the challenged claims directed to a certain paraffin composition.  The Federal Circuit determined that emails the PTAB wrongly excluded from evidence sufficiently established that the Patent Owner conceived the invention before the filing date of the prior art reference.
Continue Reading Federal Circuit Reverses PTAB’s Anticipation Decision: Proof of Prior Conception Improperly Excluded as Hearsay

Resources & Info

Arthrex and the Supreme Court Resource Center

In United States v. Arthrex, Inc., the Supreme Court has heard whether 125+ PTAB decisions rendered through October 2019 must be remanded for new decisions. Read about how that issue developed through our post.

Learn more

Our Team

PTABWatch, provided by Marshall, Gerstein & Borun LLP, analyzes and reports recent developments concerning Post-Grant Proceedings at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), including Inter Partes Review (IPR), Post Grant Review (PGR), and Covered Business Method (CBM) proceedings.