Promises, Promises: Covenant Not To Sue For Patent Infringement Includes Downstream Users

The US Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit affirmed that a district court did not err in applying ordinary rules of contract construction to a covenant not to sue and properly found that under the patent exhaustion doctrine, the covenant encompassed downstream users. Fuel Automation Station, LLC v. Energera Inc., Case Nos. 23-1123; -1358 (10th Cir. Oct. 21, 2024) (Carson, Rossman, Federico, JJ.)

Fuel Automation Station (FAS) and Energera compete in the manufacture of automated […]

By | Dec 21, 2024 ||

Intellectual Property Law In The Age Of Generative AI

The recent surge of accessible generative AI (“GenAI”) tools has kept attorneys, particularly those in the intellectual property, technology, data privacy, and cybersecurity spaces, on their toes. Within the intellectual property community, there have been ongoing discussions, incremental resolutions, and evolving opinions. In this article, we will outline and summarize the current intellectual property legal landscape in the United States related to GenAI.

I. OVERVIEW

In broad terms, GenAI tools work by digesting large amounts of […]

By | Dec 19, 2024 ||

A Halloween IP Horror Story: The Case Of The Zombie Patent

It was a day like any other — suddenly, the USPTO sent a notice stating that a patent application had been abandoned. “Jeepers Creepers!”

Files and dockets are frantically searched through to see if any deadlines were missed, but nothing appears amiss. In fact, an allowance appeared imminent in the case.

What happened? It turns out that the patent application is a 371 U.S. national phase application that entered the U.S. without an inventor declaration. However, the […]

By | Dec 17, 2024 ||