News & Publications

The US Patent and Trademark Office on July 10, 2019, designated as precedential Focal Therapeutics, Inc. v. SenoRx, Inc., Case IPR2014-00116 (PTAB July 21, 2014) (Paper 19).

The IP Practice in China Committee delegation kicked of this year's trip with a dinner with Dennis Duncan, the USPTO IP Attache based in Beijing, who provided a briefing of current developments in China.

The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit on July 5, 2019, held that the Patent Trial & Appeal Board must reexamine Global IP Holdings LLC’s bid to broaden the scope of its patent.

A split US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, on July 3, 2019, refused to revisit their February decision to invalidate a patent licensed to Quest Diagnostics Inc.’s Athena unit for a way to diagnose a severe neurological disorder.

The US Patent and Trademark Office on June 3, 2019, published an examination guide explaining how the USPTO will examine trademark applications following the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Iancu v. Brunetti.

The US Patent and Trademark Office on July 2, 2019, issued final rules requiring foreign-domiciled trademark applicants, registrants, and parties to Trademark Trial and Appeal Board proceedings to be represented by an attorney who is licensed to practice law in the United States.

The June 2019 update of the USPTO’s Trademark Trial and Appeal Board Manual of Procedure (TBMP) is now available on the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board webpage under "Policies and procedures.

On June 25, 2019, the Federal Circuit held that a trial court wrongly dismissed Cellspin Soft, Inc.’s (Cellspin), patent infringement lawsuits after determining that the four disputed patents were invalid and covered an abstract idea.

The US Supreme Court on June 24, 2019, agreed to review a case that will decide whether states can preserve the copyrights to official annotations of their laws if they hire a private company to compile and sell them.

On June 24, 2019, the Supreme Court upheld the Federal Circuit's decision in In re Brunetti, 877 F.3d 1330 (Fed. Cir. 2017), ruling that the Lanham Act provision which bars the registration of “immoral[ ] or scandalous” trademarks violates the First Amendment. Iancu v. Brunetti, No. 18-302, 6/24/2019.