Intellectual Property

by Dennis Crouch The USPTO has issued the final rules that include significant fee increases for patent applicants (and patent challengers), all set to take effect January 19, 2025 — the final day […]

by Dennis Crouch The Federal Circuit is poised to address a significant administrative law question in Apple v. Vidal regarding whether the USPTO’s NHK-Fintiv framework for discretionary IPR denials […]

by Dennis Crouch The Federal Circuit’s divided ruling in Edwards Lifesciences Corp. v. Meril Life Sciences is now before the U.S. Supreme Court — focusing on the scope of the Hatch-Waxman Act’s safe […]

by Dennis Crouch New data from the USPTO shows that the amazing transformation in patent inventorship continues: the average number of inventors per utility patent has reached 3.2 in 2024, nearly […]

The updated patent claim count data through 2024 reveals a continuing trend toward standardization in claim counts, with both the median and mean hovering around 16-17 claims per patent. The perhaps […]

by Dennis Crouch The USPTO has two traditional functions: (1) quality examination to ensure applications satisfy the demanding statutory requirements of patentability; and (2) timely and efficient […]

by Dennis Crouch Recent patent prosecution data reveals a striking trend: the percentage of utility patents containing “non-transitory” software claims continued to increase — from virtually zero 15 […]

by Dennis Crouch In my view, some of the weakest anti-AI copyright claims have fallen under 17 U.S.C. § 1202(b)(1) – an element of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) that prohibits […]

by Dennis Crouch Sitting by designation in Delaware District Court, Federal Circuit Senior Judge William Bryson found claims 1-10 of GeoComply’s U.S. Patent No. 9,413,805 ineligible under 35 U.S.C. […]

by Dennis Crouch The Federal Circuit’s pending en banc review in EcoFactor v. Google is heating up, to address fundamental questions about the reliability standards for expert damages testimony in […]

On the 20th of October 2024, this blog turned 20 years old. I’ve been both dreading and looking forward to this milestone. On the one hand, this is probably one of the longest single projects […]

Copyright AI nerds have been eagerly awaiting a decision in the German case of Kneschke v LAION (previous blog post about the case here), and yesterday we got a ruling (text of the decision in German […]

This is the third post in a series about the Copyright Wars (previous posts here and here), which I’ve written given the growing interest regarding copyright prompted by the rise of generative AI. […]

In a previous post we provided the background of what some call the Copyright Wars, delineating the sides and the parties. While legal conflicts about copyright have been raging since its inception, […]

My social timeline has been abuzz with the latest copyright decision regarding the Internet Archive, which lost its appeal in the copyright lawsuit from Hachette. In the words of a colleague, this is […]

There’s been a disturbance in the Force. Have you felt it? All across popular culture, we have been witnessing an interesting phenomenon: the blurring of lines, the fading to grey, the end of good […]

The Internet has been abuzz with the arrest in France of Telegram’s creator Pavel Durov. Details are still sketchy, but French judiciary authorities have issued a press release with some of the […]

With the release of Grok 2, Twitter’s latest model, there has been a growing number of images depicting fictional characters as well as celebrities and public personalities on the social media […]