Return Mail Argued Before the Supreme Court
By Gregory Castanias and Jihong Lou On February 19, the Supreme Court heard oral argument in Return Mail, Inc. v. United States Postal Service, No. 17-1594 (U.S.). This case raises an interesting question of statutory interpretation: whether the government is a...
PTAB Can Reach Final Written Decision On Challenges Unlikely To Succeed
By Jordan Powers and Dave Maiorana In SAS Institute v. Iancu, the Supreme Court held that when the PTAB institutes inter partes review under 35 U.S.C. § 314, it must decide the patentability of all claims the petitioner has challenged. SAS Institute left open the...
No PTAB Do Over: After SAS Remand, PTAB Denies All Grounds
By Jihong Lou, Christian Platt, and Tom Ritchie Last April, in SAS Institute, Inc. v. Iancu, 138 S. Ct. 1348 (2018), the Supreme Court held that after instituting an inter partes review, the PTAB must decide the patentability of all of the claims the petitioner has...
E-Trading Patents Are “For Technological Inventions,” Not Subject To CBM Review
By Jihong Lou and Christian Platt In a nonprecedential per curiam decision, the Federal Circuit vacated the PTAB’s final written decisions in five covered business method (“CBM”) reviews on four related e-trading patents as “arbitrary and capricious” because those...
Update: Does § 315(e)(2) Say What It Means and Mean What It Says?
By Emily Tait - When an IPR petition results in a final written decision, the IPR petitioner (or the petitioner’s real party in interest or privy) is estopped from asserting in a civil litigation or an ITC action that “the claim is invalid on any ground...