Intellectual Property

Federal Circuit Examines Written Description Requirements for U.S. Patent Application Publications Used as Prior Art Under Pre-AIAFederal Circuit Denies Preliminary Injunction In a Biologics Price Competition and Innovation Act Case

The D.C. Circuit affirmed that AI cannot be the sole author on a copyright-registered work, but left questions about the future of AI authorship in copyright for Congress to resolve.

Many patent applicants currently face difficulty in obtaining antibody claims because of written description and enablement rejections under 35 U.S.C. §112(a). The USPTO routinely rejects claims as too broad, arguing that such claims cover more antibodies than the specification discloses, or that undue experimentation would be needed to determine whether an antibody reads on the claims. These heightened disclosure requirements increase laboratory costs to generate sufficient data for a §112(a)-proof specification.

For the last several years, I’ve become obsessed with a particular legal, technological, and philosophical question: Can a robot invent on its own?

In the latest action part of a recent whirlwind of PTAB policy and procedural change around the use of so-called “discretionary denial” to refuse to a challenge to the validity of a granted patent, the Acting Director of the USPTO has issued a memorandum creating a new “bifurcated” pretrial procedure to be used for deciding whether or not to proceed with a trial in response to a petition for inter partes review or post grant review of a granted patent.

As artificial intelligence continues to drive innovation at an unprecedented pace, it has also become a battleground for litigation, particularly concerning intellectual property misappropriation, data scraping and model transparency.

A Q&A with conference speaker Ryan Phelan, a partner at Marshall, Gerstein & Borun and founder and moderator of legal blog PatentNext, to discuss how courts and jurisdictions are handling novel technologies, the copyrightability of AI-assisted art, and more.

Protection against unauthorized model distillation is an emerging issue within the longstanding theme of safeguarding IP. Existing countermeasures have primarily focused on technical solutions. This article will examine the legal protections available under the current legal framework and explore why patents may serve as a crucial safeguard against unauthorized distillation.