The Federal Circuit broke from the typical open-ended construction of “a” to mean “one or more,” and instead limited “a” to mean “one single, continuous member” in the nonprecedential opinion for Wonderland Nurser…
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The Federal Circuit has again highlighted the importance of prosecution history for patent claim interpretation. In Baker v. Microsoft Corp., No. 2017-2357 (Fed. Cir. Apr. 9, 2018) the Federal Circuit upheld a district court claim…
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The Federal Circuit agreed with the Patent Trial & Appeal Board that the claim language “form a casket body” was a structural limitation, not an intended use, and affirmed the final written decision of PTAB finding that th…
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The United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (“the Federal Circuit”) recently put the United States Patent Trial and Appeal Board (“the Board”) on notice that the broadest reasonable interpretation of claims…
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The ex parte Appellant successfully argued that, since the primary reference already taught fastening an element with screws, the Examiner failed to adequately show that one would have also fastened the element with a spring eleme…
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The Federal Circuit in Steuben Foods, Inc. v. Nestle, Inc. (Appeal No. 2017-1290, Fed. Cir., decided March 13, 2018) rejected the patent owner’s claim construction as impermissibly restricting the claim term to a specific embodi…
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In its Decision to grant institution of inter partes review in Apple Inc. v. Valencell, Inc. (IPR2017-01947, Decision dated Feb. 26, 2018), the PTAB construed the term “adjacent” to have a different meaning than that proposed…
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An updated version of the Manual of Patent Examining Procedure (MPEP) was published in January 2018 and does make one noteworthy change regarding MPEP §2143.01V titled “The Proposed Modification Cannot Change the Principle of O…
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The Patent Trial & Appeal Board applied In Re: Smith Int’l to limit the broadest reasonable interpretation of claim language in Ex parte David Ben Yair (Appeal 2017-002190, decided Jan. 10, 2018). In this case, the claim i…
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In constructing a term in the independent claim in the inter parte review of Kranos Corporation v. Riddell, Inc., (Case IPR2016-01649, Final Written Decision on Feb. 7, 2018), the Patent Trial & Appeals Board rejected the ap…
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