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ARTICLE · 08 JANUARY 2015

Three Patent Issues To Watch In 2015

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Well, 2014 was a busy year in patent law, and it wasn’t all good news for patent holders.

United StatesIntellectual Property
Courtenay Brinckerhoff
Courtenay Brinckerhoff
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Well, 2014 was a busy year in patent law, and it wasn't all good news for patent holders. The Supreme Court made 35 USC § 101 a significant hurdle to patenting inventions across a broad swath of technologies (see my post on the Alice decision here), gave more teeth the definiteness standard of 35 USC § 112 (see my post on the Nautilus decision here) and did not resolve the divided infringement problem (see my post on the Akamai decision here). For its part, the Federal Circuit expanded the reach of the doctrine of obviousnesss-type double patenting, invalidated antibody claims defined functionally, scrutinized evidence of unexpected results, and questioned whether post-filing date evidence can be used to support non-obviousness. Now that all that is behind us, here are the biggest issues that I expect to be watching in 2015.

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