Category:Intellectual Property
The “Fix” Feels Confusing: The USPTO’s New Bifurcated Process for Patent Reviews
The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) recently changed how it decides whether to move forward with patent challenges known as inter partes reviews (IPRs). Instead of a single panel deciding both discretionary and merit questions, Acting Director Coke Morgan Stewart (Stewart) created a bifurcated, two-step process. First, the Director decides whether to deny a case based on discretionary factors. If the case is approved, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) panel will then evaluate the merits.
Although designed to streamline review and manage workload, the new system has instead generated conflicting guidance and expanded discretion. Some of the new factors tend to favor patent owners, while others favor petitioners. Without clearer guidance, both sides are left uncertain: patent owners cannot reliably gauge whether their rights will hold, and petitioners cannot predict when their challenges will be heard. Clearer instruction should be given by the USPTO.
AI Copyright Conundrum: An Evolving Legal Landscape
The objective of copyright law is to protect certain rights of a human author. But what happens when a nonhuman author creates something that is original, fixed, and has a minimal degree of creativity? Well, in the wild case of Naruto v. Slater, animals cannot have copyright protection in a “Monkey selfie.” As the technological world advances, the latest dispute that has everyone going bananas is AI and copyright protection. The Copyright Office will not register works “produced by a machine or mere mechanical process” such that there is no creative input from a human author because this kind of protection goes against the objective of copyright law.