Law Commons^™

(In)Valid Patents, Paul R. Gugliuzza

Notre Dame Law Review

Increasingly, accused infringers challenge a patent’s validity in two different forums: in litigation in federal court and in post-issuance review at the Patent and Trademark Office (PTO). These parallel proceedings have produced conflicting and controversial results. For example, in one recent case, a district court rejected a challenge to a patent’s validity and awarded millions of dollars in damages for infringement. The Federal Circuit initially affirmed those rulings, ending the litigation over the patent’s validity. In a subsequent appeal about royalties owed by the infringer, however, the Federal Circuit vacated the entire judgment—including the validity ruling and damages award it …

Do Patent Challenges Increase Competition?, Stephen Yelderman

Journal Articles

This Article is the first to seriously scrutinize the claim that patent challenges lead to increased competition. It identifies a number of conditions that must hold for a patent challenge to provide this particular benefit, and evaluates the reasonableness of assuming that the pro-competitive benefits of patent challenges are generally available. As it turns out, there are a number of ways these conditions can and regularly do fail. This Article synthesizes legal doctrine, recent empirical scholarship, and several novel case studies to identify categories of challenges in which the potential benefits for competition are smaller than previously thought or, in …

Brief Amici Curiae Of 37 Intellectual Property Professors In Support Of Petition For Certiorari, Mark A. Lemley, Mark Mckenna

Court Briefs

This case presents two issues that justify this Court’s review.

First, the Federal Circuit upheld a finding of design patent infringement based on the very same Apple designs that it found functional under trade dress law. Such a counterintuitive outcome is possible because the Federal Circuit has constructed a highly constrained definition of functionality in design patent law, which is at odds with this Court’s precedent in both utility patent and trade dress cases. Coupled with its recent re-interpretation of the design patent infringement standard, the Federal Circuit’s approach to functionality makes it quite likely that defendants will be held …