With only two patent rulings handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court this term, it may have been a relatively quiet year on the patent front, but it's sure been a busy decade at the high court and beyond. Law360 ranked the blockbuster decisions that have shaped patent law into what it is today, with Williamson v. Citrix Online taking fourth place. Goodwin Intellectual Property partners Mark Abate and Calvin Wingfield represented International Business Machines Corporation in this landmark victory.
The en banc Federal Circuit cleared the way for more patents to be challenged as indefinite in this 2015 decision, which discarded a rule that had restricted the circumstances in which that invalidity theory could be used. The court eliminated what had been a strong presumption that patents that do not contain the word "means" are immune from a certain type of indefiniteness arguments, saying that rule was "inappropriate" and had been "placing a thumb on what should otherwise be a balanced analytical scale." As a result, more claims, particularly in software patents, became vulnerable to indefiniteness attacks, leading to an increase in the number of patents being held invalid.
Read the full article here.
The en banc Federal Circuit cleared the way for more patents to be challenged as indefinite in this 2015 decision, which discarded a rule that had restricted the circumstances in which that invalidity theory could be used. The court eliminated what had been a strong presumption that patents that do not contain the word "means" are immune from a certain type of indefiniteness arguments, saying that rule was "inappropriate" and had been "placing a thumb on what should otherwise be a balanced analytical scale." As a result, more claims, particularly in software patents, became vulnerable to indefiniteness attacks, leading to an increase in the number of patents being held invalid.
Read the full article here.