In KSR International v. Teleflex, Inc., the U.S. Supreme Court is currently considering the appropriate standard for determining whether the invention claimed in a patent is obvious. Particularly, the Court is evaluating the Federal Circuit's requirement for a teaching, suggetion, or motivation...

Additive manufacturing techniques, colloquially referred to as 3D printing, increasingly will place pressure on the world’s patent systems in a manner akin to the challenges the copyright systems faced due to digital files. Unlike copyright, however, the digital files themselves do not, under...

Patents are generally considered to be the most territorial of all the various forms of intellectual property. Even patent law, however, has confronted issues involving the application of a U.S. patent to extraterritorial activity. The Supreme Court has expressed an interest in both issues –...

This Article explores the potential impact the The Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) could have on broader claim construction doctrine. It starts by offering an overview of claim construction in the courts and in the USPTO. It then considers the potential unintended consequence of a...

Patents are creatures of national law and are generally viewed as the most territorial of all intellectual property rights. Nevertheless, patent law has long deviated from a rule of strict territoriality. On many dimensions, U.S. patent law takes into account activities occurring outside of the...

Many of the problems with modern patent-eligibility analysis can be traced back to a fundamental philosophical divide between judges who treat eligibility as the primary tool for effectuating patent policy and those who take patent-eligibility as nothing more than a coarse filter to be invoked...

The concept of possession in property law operates to allocate property rights among competing claimants by awarding the property to the first to take possession. Possession in this context requires an act that communicates to third parties that someone has exercised dominion over the item....

The digital revolution has now moved beyond music and video files. A person can now translate three-dimensional objects into digital files and, at the press of a button, recreate those items via a 3D printer or similar device. Just as digitization placed pressure on the copyright system, so will...

There is significant domestic and international opposition to gene patents based on the fact that gene patents deter medical research and health care, as well as the policy position that genes are an inherent product of nature. Yet, equally troubling is the fact that gene patents have been...

Patent law is generally considered the most territorial forms of intellectual property. The extension of infringement to include “offers to sell” inventions opened the door to potential extraterritorial expansion of U.S. patent law. In Transocean Offshore Deepwater Drilling, Inc. v. Maersk...