Fresh From the Bench: Latest Federal Circuit Court Cases

CASE OF THE WEEK

SIPCO, LLC v. Emerson Electric Co., Appeal No. 2018-1635 (Fed. Cir. Sept. 25, 2019)

In this appeal of the Patent Trial and Appeal Board’s (PTAB) final written decision regarding covered business method (CBM) review of SIPCO’s U.S. Patent No. 8,908,842 (“the ’842 patent”), the Federal Circuit addresses issues relating to claim construction and eligibility for CBM review.
The ’842 patent concerns the use of a “low-power” remote transceiver configured to wirelessly transmit a signal with instruction data for delivery to a network of devices. Two dependent claims of the ’842 patent allow for the remote device to be associated with a vending machine or an ATM.

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ALSO THIS WEEK

Campbell Soup Company v. Gamon Plus, Inc., Appeal Nos. 2018-2029, -2030 (Fed. Cir. Sept. 26, 2019)

In an appeal from an inter parties review, the Court addressed whether the PTAB erred in finding two design patents not invalid for obviousness. On appeal, the court addressed the standard to find a piece of prior art sufficient to qualify as a primary reference for such an analysis. The Court vacated the PTAB’s findings and partially remanded the claims, because “the ever-so-slight differences in [the] design [of one of the patents], in light of the overall similarities,” created “basically the same visual impression as the claimed designs,” and thus allowed that reference to qualify as a primary reference for a design patent obviousness analysis.

The opinion can be found here.

Written by: Scott D. Eads and Nika Aldrich, Schwabe Williamson & Wyatt

Contributors: Erin Forbes and Bazsi Takacs