IP Newsflash

The Federal Circuit recently held that a patentee acted as its own lexicographer to define a claim term even though it did not explicitly define the term. Rather, because the patentee consistently and clearly used two terms interchangeably to describe the same structural feature and did so in all of the embodiments in which the feature appeared, the patentee impliedly gave the term its own, unique definition.

The Federal Circuit recently held an asserted patent was not entitled to its priority date because the priority application lacked written description support for the asserted claims. In so doing, the court explained that broad disclosures that do not provide reasonably specific support for narrower claims do not meet the written description requirement. The court also considered whether the inventor’s testimony showed they possessed the full scope of the claimed genus at the priority date or whether it was more likely the inventors first became aware of the claimed embodiments from public disclosures of the accused product.

In a Hatch-Waxman case, the District of Delaware denied a motion for summary judgment seeking to apply the ANDA filing date as the date of the hypothetical negotiation used to calculate reasonable royalty damages. Instead, the court determined that the appropriate date to use for the hypothetical negotiation is the launch date.

The district of Delaware recently denied a defendant’s partial motion to dismiss pre-suit willful infringement from the litigation, finding instead that the allegations taken as a whole were sufficient to support pre-suit willfulness at the pleading stage. Specifically, the court found that the allegations as to the defendant’s involvement in a related foreign opposition proceeding and participation in the relevant industry were accompanied by detailed factual support that sufficiently pleaded willful infringement for the pre-suit period.

The Ninth Circuit recently reversed a district court’s decision to strike a plaintiff’s trade secret claims under the Defend Trade Secrets Act (DTSA) at the discovery stage. In doing so, the Ninth Circuit made clear that under the DTSA, whether a party defined their trade secret with sufficient particularity is a question of fact that generally does not lend itself to resolution in the absence of at least some discovery. This ruling contrasts with the California Uniform Trade Secrets Act (CUTSA), which requires a party to define their trade secrets with reasonable particularity before commencing discovery.

The Federal Circuit recently vacated a summary judgment ruling of invalidity, holding that the district court erred in applying preclusive effect to the Patent Trial and Appeal Board’s unpatentability findings regarding other claims in the same patent. In doing so, the Federal Circuit reiterated that issue preclusion does not apply where the prior factual determinations were made under a lower standard of proof.

The Federal Circuit recently clarified the requirement for work disclosed in a reference to qualify as “by another” under pre-AIA Sections 102(a) and (e), holding that there must be complete inventive identity between the information disclosed in the asserted reference and the inventors named on the relevant patent. 

The District Court for the Northern District of California recently granted a defendant’s motion to bifurcate, ordering that issues related to PGR estoppel should be decided in a bench trial, while the remaining issues in the case should proceed to a jury trial.

The Northern District of Iowa recently held that a defendant’s motion for partial summary judgment of invalidity was barred after the PTAB issued final written decisions, regardless of when the motion was filed. The defendant filed its motion before the final written decisions were issued, but the court rejected the defendant’s argument that the timing of the motion insulated it from estoppel.