It has long been a strategy for a company facing charges of infringement in district court to initiate an action with the PTO to invalidate some or all of the patent claims at issue - by ex parte re-exam, inter partes re-exam or, since the passage of the America Invents Act in 2011, inter partes review. Because court cases and PTO proceedings progress at different speeds, it is typical for the court and the PTO to reach a decision at different times. When those tribunals reach conclusions at odds with one another - say, the court finds the patents valid and infringed and the PTO finds them invalid - the litigants are forced to continue the fight until the situation gets sorted out. Within the past year, the Federal Circuit has issued three decisions which bring some clarity to this murky area. This article exams those decisions.
Posted on: Mon, 22 Sep 2014 23:21:29 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015