Attorney:
Kurt M. Berger, Ph.D.
August 16, 2022
The Federal Circuit recently affirmed a decision in the Eastern District of Virginia holding that the Patent Act unambiguously requires an inventor to be a natural person.<... Read more
Attorney:
James R. Love
November 1, 2021
Drafting claims with infringement in mind has always been a challenge. For instance, claims should be drafted to ensure that they can be infringed by a single party in order to address divided infringement issues. Similarly, it may be useful to draft claims in a way that avoids requiring end-user infringement as end-users may not be the best target when considering litigation. In the same vein, it is important to draft claims in a way that infringement is detectable, as a patent owner must have facts that provide a plausible entitlement to relief. This means that the patent owner must have some basis to allege that the patent claims are being infringed. If the claims include features that are not readably detectable, the claims may, in effect, be useless when considering infringement. This is especially true in Artificial Intelligence where many features are difficult to easily detect without intimate knowledge of the AI system. In fact, AI systems are often considered black box systems in which the inner workings are not evident to the outside and sometimes not even to the operator of the AI system.<... Read more
October 7, 2021
by: Robert W. Downs, Ph.D.
My career includes work in research in artificial intelligence, patent examination at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and patent application preparation and prosecution, all over a period of about 40 years. Over that period, I have completed three Masters Degree programs in computer-related fields. As a researcher, I have experienced the difficult challenge of not just writing computer programs in programming languages such as Fortran and Lisp, but getting the programs to work and actually produce desired results. As a patent examiner, I have experienced the difficult challenge of searching for prior art based on a high level description of an invention, as well as judging whether a computer-related invention is patentable under Section 101. As a patent agent, I have experienced a difficult challenge of preparing patent application for computer-related inventions, while keeping in mind a broad range of potential prior art and the high possibility of receiving a rejection under Section 101.<... Read more
July 8, 2021
On June 22, 2021, a Western District of Texas jury returned a verdict in Freshhub, Inc. v. Amazon.com Inc., finding that Amazon’s Alexa devices do not infringe three voice technology patents owned by Freshub.[1] We want to report and discuss this case on the AI Patent Blog because virtual assistant software and products represent a commercially significant form of AI technology, and this case dives into the nuanced differences between legacy voice recognition software and modern AI-based virtual assistants.<... Read more
June 11, 2021
written by: Kasumi Kanetaka
A question that is often asked is why there are so many lawyers? The question is often paired with questions about why lawyers spend so much time on seemingly insignificant tasks and why they are always busy and have a poor work-life balance.<... Read more