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Regardless of whether a patent practitioner’s clients favor a stricter or more lenient eligibility regime, patent eligibility decisions continue to evolve. Patent practitioners have been seeking updated guidance since 2014’s Alice Corp. Pty. v. CLS Bank Int’l, 573, U.S. 208 (2014) decision, and we may see some from American Axle & Mfg. v. Neapco Holdings, LLC, 967 F.3d 1285 (Fed. Cir. 2020). We are still waiting for a response to last year’s invitation from the Supreme Court to the Solicitor General seeking guidance on granting certiorari in American Axle. Some practitioners have wondered why American Axle should be the subject of such long-awaited guidance. Indeed, practitioners filing an amicus brief in Interactive Wearables, LLC v. Polar Electro Oy, stated their preference for an application surrounding an “intuitive technology” over American Axle’s “highly technical subject matter.” Interactive Wearables, LLC v. Polar Electro Oy, et al., No. 21-1281, Brief of the Chicago Patent Attorneys as Amici Curiae in Support of Petitioner at 4 (U.S. April 21, 2022). However, it can be argued that the level of technicality is indeed what makes it the right case: We need a line drawn for what practitioners expect to be clearer. Hardware inventions are facing patent eligibility challenges that would have seemed more likely in software inventions. Recent court decisions have shown that what once made a hardware invention eligible may no longer fly.
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Beyond Language: How Multimodal AI Sees the Bigger Picture
By Matthew R. Carey
The possibilities for patenting innovative applications of multimodal models across industries are endless.
Protecting Technology-Assisted Works and Inventions: Where Does AI Begin?
By Ed Lanquist, Jr. and Dominic Rota
Just like any new technology, efforts to protect and enforce intellectual property on AI-based technologies are likely to be hampered by a lack of both a unified governing framework and a common understanding of the technology.
Content-Licensing Payment Dispute Turns On Existence of Fiduciary Relationship
By Stan Soocher
A recent New York federal court decision in a dispute between a broker that sublicenses program content and a broadcaster that sublicensed content from the broker considered the interaction of contract language and extra-contractual elements of the parties’ relationship to determine whether a fiduciary relationship existed.
Federal Judge Blasts Patent Trolls
By Rob Maier
A recent order from Chief Judge Colm Connolly in the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware may serve as a warning for “patent trolls” — the derogatory term used to describe companies whose sole function is to acquire and then assert patents, often in cases that are questionable on the merits — against filing cases in Delaware going forward.