When founders leave their company, they often remain involved as consultants to ensure a smooth transition for the business. These consulting agreements also often include a patent assignment provision where any inventions developed during the consulting period are to be disclosed and assigned to the company. The Eighth Circuit’s decision in Sleep Number Corp. v. […]
The accused infringer in patent litigation will sometimes propose a negative claim construction that excludes a feature or aspect of the accused product, and thus avoid infringing the patent claim. But if the excluded feature does not have a uniform meaning in the art, then a more affirmative construction may be needed. In Sound View […]
To satisfy the definiteness requirement of Section 112(b), the claims of a patent must particularly point out and distinctly claim the subject matter of the invention. 35 U.S.C. § 112(b) (a patent’s “specification shall conclude with one or more claims particularly pointing out and distinctly claiming the subject matter which the inventor or a joint […]
By James Juo. Inter Partes Review (“IPR”) is an administrative process before the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (“PTAB”) which handles patent validity challenges as an alternative to litigation. A forum selection clause in a contract, however, might prohibit the filing of an IPR petition; depending on the nature of the agreement and the actual […]
By James Juo. In patent law, a patent is interpreted from the perspective of a hypothetical person of ordinary skill in the art, sometimes abbreviated as POSITA (and sometimes abbreviated as PHOSITA for a person having ordinary skill in the art). According to Professor Dennis Crouch, the abbreviation POSITA appears in 68% of PTAB cases […]