Patent Law Practice Center

Reexamination Requests Filed the Week of September 13th

Here is this week’s  installment of Reexamination Requests from Scott M. Daniels, of Reeaxamination Alert and Practice Center Contributor….

Perhaps the most important reexamination request last week was filed by Google against a Xerox patent (Ex parte No. 6).  The patent is the subject of a pending law suit in Delaware between the parties.  Earlier this month, Magistrate Judge Mary Pat Thynge issued a decision in that case allowing Google to use counsel from its litigation team for any reexamination – essentially, she concluded that the potential harm to Google of limiting its choice of reexamination counsel outweighed the risk of improper use by Google’s reexamination counsel of Xerox’s protective order information.

Another interesting request was filed against an Amylin patent (Ex parte No. 13) for exendins which are peptide hormones that regulate blood glucose levels.  A reexamination (95/000,276) has been pending since 2007 against similar Amylin extendins patent – the ‘276 reexamination is noteworthy in that it features that rare creature: the reexamination continuation.  The earlier Amylin reexamination was filed by competitor ConjuChem.  (more…)

Reexamination Requests Filed the Week of September 6th

Here is the latest  installment of Reexamination Requests from Scott M. Daniels, of Reeaxamination Alert and Practice Center Contributor which includes the requests for the week of September 6th….

Last week saw two blockbuster sets of filings – Shared Marketing Services filed ex parte requests against five eComSystems patents (6) to (10), and Illinois Tool Works filed ex parte requests against seven patents belonging to Digi-Star (13) to (19).  Illinois Tool has appeared in many reexaminations over the years.  In both instances, the respective parties are in litigation.

Two other ex parte reexamination requests may prove to be commercially significant, one filed against a Hitachi semiconductor patent (25), and another filed against a Kubota tractor patent (30).  The names of the companies that filed these requests are not apparent from the files.

Finally, information regarding the last of the eight PubPat requests against Abbott, inter partes (8), became available last week. (more…)

Reexamination Requests Filed the Weeks of August 16th and 23rd

Here is the latest  installment of Reexamination Requests from Scott M. Daniels, of Reeaxamination Alert and Practice Center Contributor which includes the requests for the weeks of August 16th and August 23rd….

Reexamination Requests Filed the Week of August 16^th

Most notable among last week’s requests is one filed by Sprint attacking an EMSAT patent for a cellular telephone system.  EMSAT’s patent is the subject of no less than eight separate law suits.  Let’s not forget Rambus, whose patents are reexamined more often than those of any other company.  Last week the requester was Hynix, not NVIDIA.

The following inter partes requests were made:

(1)  95/001,420 (electronically filed) – U.S. Patent No. 6,163,816 owned by FlashPoint Technology, Inc. and entitled SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR RETRIEVING CAPABILITY PARAMETERS IN AN ELECTRONIC IMAGING DEVICE.  Filed August 18, 2010.

(2)  95/000,562 (paper filed) – U.S. Patent No. 7,002,533 entitled DUAL-STAGE HIGH-CONTRAST ELECTRONIC IMAGE DISPLAY.  Filed August 2, 2010 by Dolby Laboratories, Inc. (more…)

Reexamination Requests Filed the Weeks of August 2nd And August 9th

Here is the latest  installment of Reexamination Requests from Scott M. Daniels, of Reeaxamination Alert and Practice Center Contributor which includes the requests for the weeks of August 2nd and August 9th….

Reexamination Requests Filed the Week of August 9^th

The pace of new reexamination requests slowed a bit this past week.  One of the more interesting is the request filed August 9^th against a design patent owned by Durham for a portion of a cabinet shelf.  As we have previously reported, reexamination of design patents tends to be much more rigorous than original prosecution.  In the case of the Durham patent, the third party requester characterized the patented design as “identical” to the prior art or at least “within the zone of obviousness.”  Interestingly, the third party requester did not attempt, on the basis of recent case law, to assert that the features shown in the drawings are functional and therefore not available to support patentability over the prior art.  (more…)

Reexamination Requests Filed the Week of July 26th

Here is the latest  installment of Reexamination Requests from Scott M. Daniels, of Reeaxamination Alert and Practice Center Contributor…

An interesting request this week is one filed by Volkswagen against an Acacia patent that is also the subject of two law suits in the Eastern District of Texas.

To update our article of June 23^rd where we reported requests by Furuno against five Honeywell patents, we note that Furuno has now obtained a stay of the litigation between the two companies involving those patents – the trial judge was not persuaded by Honeywell’s unusual argument that Furuno’s motion, filed six months after Honeywell’s complaint, was “premature.”

Reexamination requests are typically reported in the Official Gazette approximately three months after filing. Such a delay in reporting requests, particularly for requests that involve copending District Court litigation, is too long. We therefore report new ex parte and inter partes reexamination requests filed electronically the previous week as they appear on the Patent Office PAIR system.  Information on concurrent litigation is also provided, where available.

Some reexamination requests are still filed by paper.  Because of the time required for the Patent Office to review such paper requests before posting on PAIR, our report may come three weeks after filing.  The information available from the Patent Office may be incomplete in a few cases because not all the reexamination request papers have yet been posted on PAIR.  There may also be gaps in the Patent Office docket numbers listed because, for any of various reasons, a reexamination request has been assigned a docket number but is not ready for posting. (more…)