Don't believe the legal paper 'industry' (or the patent microcosm)

Summary: The Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) continues to make progress reforming the patent system by eliminating a lot of patents and setting an example (or new standards) for what is patent-eligible after Alice

THE patent microcosm wants us to believe that the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) has devalued or stopped what PTAB was doing. They want us to think there's some kind of feud or conflict -- one that they themselves inflame.

Let's wait and see how many law firms will bother covering the frequent outcomes from cases where CAFC sides with PTAB on issues pertaining to invalidation of patents. Here is one such new case. To quote MIP:

The Federal Circuit has dismissed an appeal of Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) final written decision in an inter partes review (IPR), arguing that because "Phigenix has not offered sufficient proof establishing that it has suffered an injury in fact, it lacks standing to bring suit in federal court".

Here is a direct link to the decision [PDF]

PTAB is breaking some records again (based on some criteria), as shown by these latest figures. For the uninitiated, PTAB is slaughtering/squashing software patents more frequently than anything else, including courts. Petitions to PTAB, or IPRs as they are commonly called once processed, are also more reachable/accessible to small businesses that hope to undermine patents which large companies should never have been granted in the first place.

MIP's PTAB round-up says:

December Patent Trial and Appeal Board petition filing was the fourth-highest of 2016, the Federal Circuit recently heard en banc arguments in one PTAB appeal and granted en banc rehearing in another, the appeals court remanded the Board in In re NuVasive, and the District of Delaware interpreted the scope of estoppel narrowly in Intellectual Ventures v Toshiba

When patent trolls like Intellectual Ventures go after large companies such as Toshiba they expect to get a lot of money. Intellectual Ventures was recently defeated in an epic cases where quite a few of its patents -- software patents to be exact -- got rejected by a prominent CAFC judge.

There is no compelling evidence to suggest that things are changing in favour of the patent microcosm, at least not in PTAB. No doubt, however, they will continue to lie to everyone -- their clients included -- in order to improve their bottom line. The term "fake news" seems applicable here. ⬆