To Be Or Not To Be: Standing In Invasion of Privacy Cases

In the case of Frank v. Gaos, argued before the United States Supreme Court on October 31, 2018, oral argument took an unexpected turn, leading the Justices to direct the parties (and the Solicitor General) to brief the question of whether any named plaintiff had standing, i.e., whether they were in fact injured, in a...

Federal Circuit Clips The Wings of Covered Business Method Review

In an opinion yesterday in Unwired Planet, LLC v. Google Inc., a three–judge panel of the Federal Circuit significantly limited the scope of Patent Office review of business method patents under the America Invents Act. The appellate court shrunk the universe of patents eligible for covered business method (CBM) review, a result which may please...

Google Adds Prior Art To Patent Page

The Google Patents page has been for some time now a one–stop shop for copies of published U.S. patents and patent applications. This week, the search engine giant added a new wrinkle—prior art. In an announcement published on July 16, 2015, Google Deputy General Counsel for Patents, Allen Lo, and Software Engineer for Google Patents,...

The New Normal? Federal Circuit Affirms Invalidity Under Alice

Yesterday, the Federal Circuit issued an opinion in buySAFE v. Google, its latest opinion on patent eligibility after Alice v. CLS Bank, affirming the judgment of the district court that the asserted claims were invalid because they claimed nothing more than the abstract idea of guaranteeing performance of a transaction implemented on a computer. Perhaps the...