News & Publications

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.

The EU General Court in Luxembourg on June 19, 2019, limited the reach of sportswear giant Adidas’s iconic trademark.

The Federal Circuit on June 17, 2019, held that patent holders who introduce new claims during the prosecution of a patent must ensure those claims meet the requirements in the original patent.

The American Intellectual Property Law Association on June 14, 2019, filed an amicus brief in 1-800 Contacts v. Federal Trade Commission.

On April 29 – May 3, 2019, the IPP Far East Committee dispatched a delegation to visit Taiwan and Singapore. The trip delegation was headed up by Patrick Coyne, AIPLA’s Second Vice President, and Tiep Nguyen, the Far East Committee Chair.

The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit on June 14, 2019, held that 11th Amendment Sovereign Immunity does not protect patents owned by individual states from being cancelled via inter partes review (IPR).

AIPLA attended meetings of the Industry IP5, IP5 Heads of Offices, and the Industry Trilateral in Incheon, Korea June 10-13, 2019.