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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In Smith & Nephew, Covidien v. Hologic, (Fed. Cir., 2018) the CAFC interpreted the claim phrase “simultaneously rotate, translate, and reciprocate” such that reciprocating includes a translating motion, but is not necessar…
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In In Re: Nordt Development Co., the CAFC vacated the Board’s finding that the claim term “injection molded” was a product-by-process limitation that was not afforded patentable weight.
Claim 1 includes many instances of …
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U.S. Patent No. 5,987,863 (“the ‘863 patent”), owned by the Exmark Manufacturing Company (“Exmark”), recently survived a challenge to its claim 1 as indefinite under 35 U.S.C. §112, ¶2 for inclusion of the phrase …
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A recent case from the Federal Circuit demonstrates the perils of pointing out problems in prior art in a patent specification. In Rembrandt Patent Innovations LLC v. Apple Inc., No. 2016-2324 (Nov. 22, 2017) (non-precedential)…
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