AT the dawn of the new year (and end of last year) we said we would focus on the European Patent Office (EPO) and no longer focus on USPTO matters unless or until there's a threat of software patents rebound. A month later there's no change at all. 35 U.S.C. €§ 101 remains in tact albeit Iancu hopes to water it down [1, 2], SCOTUS issues decisions on totally unrelated questions (one more a week ago), a former Federal Circuit chief judge expresses only a desire for a rebound in 2019 (wishful thinking over at Watchtroll), and Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) inter partes reviews (IPRs) continue unabated. Patent maximalists just cherry-pick exceptional cases where PTAB overturns examiners' decisions to reject (those are still very few, less than a handful per week). That being the case, we'll continue to observe developments and outcomes of cases in US patent courts. But we probably won't cover them here. Hopefully we'll never need to because assuming nothing changes (for the worse), we can focus on other topics. ⬆