The PTAB periodically designates certain of its decisions as
precedential or informative to provide guidance concerning Patent
Office practice and procedure. A list of those decisions may be
found here. Recently, the PTAB designated four
decisions as informative and one as precedential. These recent
designations relate to establishment of a prior art reference as a
printed publication in both examination and post-grant
contexts.
Significantly, these new designations come on the heels of the
designation of Hulu, LLC v. Sound View Innovations, LLC,
IPR2018-01039, Paper 29 (PTAB Dec. 20, 2019) as precedential in
December of 2019. In Hulu, the Precedential Opinion Panel
that included the Director, Commission for Patents, and the Chief
Administrative Patent Judge of the PTAB clarified that it is the
Petitioner's burden to establish a reasonable
likelihood that a reference is a printed publication
for institution of an inter partes review (IPR). The PTAB
stated that the
