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On April 3, 2012, the Federal Circuit ruled (2 to 1, opinion by Judge Lourie) that a district court (N.Y., N.D.) incorrectly granted summary judgment of noninfringement in favor of J&L Fiber Services, Inc. (“J&L”). Advanced Fiber Technologies (“AFT”), owner of U.S. Pat. No. 5,200,072 and RE 39,940, sued J&L after it began selling its V-Max wedgewire screens for use in paper and pulp processing.

A GVR order was recently issued in the Association of Molecular Pathology v. Myriad case in light of the recent Mayo v. Prometheus Supreme Court ruling. The Federal Circuit is to analyze the applicability of the Supreme Court case of Mayo v. Prometheus to Myriad’s isolated DNA claims and to method claim 20 of the ’282 patent.

It’s not that I despise mayonnaise or fear saturated fat; I just like less of the white goo than most teenage burger jockeys like to apply. I must admit, however, that the Supreme Court’s sticky ruling in Mayo Collaborative Services v. Prometheus Laboratories, Inc., 566 U.S. __ (2012), gave me indigestion.

Conventional wisdom holds that it is better, at least in the long run, to adopt and register a strong trademark than a weak one. Still, weak marks have their allure: they are easier to invent than strong marks and, as a recent precedential decision by the United States Trademark Trial and Appeal Board (TTAB) demonstrates, the weaker they are, the easier they may be to register. The ruling is In re Hartz Hotel Services, Inc., Serial No. 76692673 (March 19, 2012) [precedential], which came to my attention via John Welch’s THE TTABlog, one of my favorite IP blogs.

Every now and then, a court will produce an opinion that seasoned practitioners may find to be – well, a bit odd. This might be the reaction of some in reading the scholarly, but somewhat obliquely argued Dissenting Opinion in the Federal Circuit’s recent alleged patent malpractice case of Byrne v. Wood Herron & Evans. Others may find that these highly intellectual, but rather disembodied, judicial comments could be a bit lacking in historical perspective.

The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit recently ruled (ClearValue Inc. v. Pearl River Polymers Inc., Fed. Cir., No. 2011-1078, Feb. 17, 2012) that a genus anticipates a species, at least sometimes. We all learned once that disclosure of a species will anticipate a later-claimed genus. However, the converse is usually not true. In ClearValue, the Federal Circuit reversed a district court (Texas, E.D.) ruling and invalidated ClearValue’s patent claim. It held that a generic disclosure anticipates a species claim, even if the reference discloses no example within the claimed range, unless the patent owner can show that the clamed range is somehow “critical” or that the examples of the claimed range “work differently.”

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