USA patent courts and appeals

Series:About patent courts
and appeals in:

• Canada
• Germany
• Japan
• UK
• USA

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Related articles:

• Specialised courts
• Reading case law
• Case law by region

USA

• Legislation
• Case law
• Courts system
• USPTO

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• SHIELD Act
• America Invents
• Category: USA

This article describes which bodies handle approval, rejection, and disputes of patent validity in the USA.

The stages of litigation

• Patents are considered at the USPTO by an examiner
• Disputes can be taken to the USPTO's Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences (BPAI)
• To contest a BPAI decision, you go to the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC)^{[reference needed]}

• When you sue someone for patent infringement, the validity of the patent can be called into question, and this litigation is in a District Court
  • When suing someone, you might also apply to the International Trade Commission to have imports of their products blocked
    • Decisions by the ITC can be appealed to the CAFC.

• To contest the district court's ruling, you go to the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC)
  • When the CAFC hears a case en banc, this means that all the judges participated, not just a subset; this is usually done for important cases where the CAFC wants to set a precedent
• To contest the CAFC's ruling, you can apply to the Supreme Court (sometimes abbreviated "SCOTUS")
  • This is called applying for certiorari
• If the Supreme Court grants certiorari, they will rule on it with the highest authority of the USA

Hierarchy and vacating lower rulings

When the Supreme Court gives its opinion on a case, not only does this opinion override the opinion of the lower court, but the Supreme Court can also issue a "grant-vacate-remand order" to nullify certain other rulings of lower courts which may give turn out differently in the light of the Supreme Court's newer ruling.

For example, in the 2009 Mayo Collaborative Services v. Prometheus Laboratories, Inc. case the CAFC upheld a patent, saying that it passed the machine-or-transformation test. (The US Supreme Court took the case in 2012 and disagreed.) After tweaking that test in 2010 in the Bilski v. Kappos ruling, the Supreme Court vacated the CAFC's 2009 Mayo ruling and ordered a retrial. (In the retrial, the CAFC reached the same conclusion; the Supreme Court then agreed to hear the Mayo case.)

A Supreme Court ruling not only overrides the preceding CAFC ruling, but the Supreme Court can also vacate other court rulings of lower courts that may

Federal Rules of Civil Procedure

Abbreviated FRCP.

12(b)(6): motion for quick dismissal

Rule 12(b)(6) can be used by a defendant to file a motion for dismissal.

This was successfully done in the case Uniloc v. Red Hat and Rackspace (2013, USA), where the judge agreed that Uniloc's patent was clearly invalid and there was thus no grounds for a court case.

Judge's titles

At the ITC: administrative law judge

At the CAFC: Circuit Judge NAME

At the Supreme Court: Justice NAME

Related pages on en.swpat.org

• Case law in the USA
• How to submit an amicus brief in the USA

External links

• http://www.uspto.gov/go/dcom/bpai/index.html - The USPTO's BPAI
• RECAP - an archive of "PACER" documents - this is only a small subset of US court documents, but it's the only publicly available repository
• Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, Wikipedia

References

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