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Amazon to Control Delivery by Drone?

People are talking about and news organizations are covering Amazon’s announced plans to deliver goods by drone in the not-too-distant future. However, fewer are talking about or covering Amazon’s effort to be the only company that can autonomously deliver goods by drone. On March 25, 2014, Amazon filed a United States patent application directed to aspects of a drone delivery system. Pursuant to current patent law, the application was published on October 1, 2015, roughly 18 months after the application was filed. While the application is still pending and not yet an issued patent, it provides an interesting look at the scope of protection Amazon is seeking for its drone delivery system.

Under current proposed FAA regulations, drones cannot be flown outside of the line of sight of the operator. A much greater range will be needed for an effective drone delivery network. Amazon is proposing to send its drones as far as 15 miles from a regional fulfillment center. The drones would take off vertically from a warehouse floor, fly at low altitude over a suburban landscape and then descend into the backyards of their destination points. There they would lay the package on the lawn before lifting off to return to the warehouse for another run. The success of such a system will depend upon receiving FAA approval. FAA approval of such a system is likely to be contingent upon demonstrating that the system can be operated without causing a hazard. In other words, the drones will need to be equipped with “sense and avoid” technology that prevents them from crashing into things.

Amazon’s pending patent application, Pub. No. US 2015/0277440 A1, contains claims that are broadly directed to a propeller driven automated mobile vehicle having a laser based rangefinder configured to determine a distance to an object, to a distance determining system for an automated mobile vehicle having a distance determining element positioned to emit a laser signal that reflects off a reflective exterior surface of a motor, and to an automated mobile vehicle having a plurality of motors where the alignment axis of at least two of the motors are not parallel and each motor has a distance determining element. These claims have not yet been examined by the Patent Office. Upon examination, the scope of the claims will likely have to be narrowed to distinguish them from prior art. However, it seems clear that Amazon is interested in pursuing broad protection for “drones” having a distance determining element, which is likely to be a necessary component of any “sense and avoid” technology. Thus, the potential exists that Amazon will obtain patent protection broadly covering drone delivery systems.

The way the Amazon patent application is written, it seeks to avoid the need for human involvement to ensure that vehicles do not collide with other drones, manned aircraft, or other objects or structures on the ground. It also discusses a system for automatically sensing and avoiding objects. Thus, the “automated mobile vehicles” of the application and recited in the claims appear to be directed to autonomous drones. However, at this stage it is not yet clear whether the claims in any patent that issues will be limited to autonomous drones, but might also cover remotely-piloted drones. It remains to be seen whether the examination process will push Amazon into limiting the claims to autonomous operation.

The Amazon patent application also discusses the distance determining elements being used to detect the presence of objects and to then cause the automated mobile vehicle to alter its path to avoid the object. Thus, the distance determining elements seem to be used not only for unloading positioning, but also for sense and avoid in flight. While in a remotely piloted context, a sense and avoid system may not need to actually determine distances to other objects. The remote pilot could rely on visual displays of the surrounding environment of the drone to avoid collisions. However, in an autonomous operation, it is difficult to envision any sense and avoid system that would not need to know at least the distance from the drone to surrounding objects to function. Amazon appears to be using this need to know such distances in the autonomous context to preempt the field. In other words, a patent covering any autonomous drone that determines distance to surrounding objects might preclude any other drones from being able to have a functioning sense and avoid capability.

The broadest claims in the Amazon patent application just recite a “distance determining element.” In a narrower claim, the application specifies “the distance determining element is at least one of an ultrasonic ranging module, a laser rangefinder, a radar distance measurement module, stadiametric based rangefinder, a parallax based rangefinder, a coincidence based rangefinder, a Lidar based rangefinder, Sonar based rangefinder, or a time-of-flight based rangefinder.” Thus, at this stage, Amazon is trying to cover all of the named techniques, any combination of those techniques, as well as anything else that could broadly be considered a distance determining element.

As noted, the Amazon patent application is still just pending and has yet to be examined. Amazon may have other patent applications pending that have not yet been published, and therefore are not yet open to review by the public. FAA regulations are also still developing. Thus, much remains to be determined even as it relates to Amazon itself. Other entities may also be working on drone delivery systems and/or have pending patent applications that have not yet been published. Domino’s Pizza is said to have tested delivering pizzas by drone. Skype’s co-founders have set up Starship Technologies to develop a ground-based drone that would be able to deliver groceries to customer’s homes. It will be very interesting to see how the intellectual property protection for drone delivery systems plays out.

Article By Thomas J. Daly of Lewis Roca Rothgerber LLP

Delicious Look At Cookie Press Patent

I like to bake cookies, and this time of year gives me the perfect excuse to bake a lot of cookies. One of my favorite recipes uses a cookie press, which made me curious about cookie press patents. There are only a few granted U.S. patents with “Cookie Press” in the title, but U.S. Patent 6,708,853 seems to claim technology that I put to good use every December.

The Cookie Press Patent

U.S. Patent 6,708,853 names Hugh Melling asthe inventor and is assigned to Wilton Industries, Inc. Claim 1 recites:

1. An apparatus for dispensing a food substance comprising: a) a housing; b) a barrel connected to the housing and adapted to receive the food substance; c) a plunger slidably positioned within the barrel; d) a rod having teeth thereon and connected to the plunger; e) an advancing mechanism movably positioned within the housing and including: i) an escapement body; ii) a driver slidably positioned within the escapement body; iii) a spring engaging the driver and the escapement body so that the driver is biased toward said rod so that the driver engages a tooth of said rod; f) a lever pivotally attached to the housing and engaging said advancing mechanism so that when said lever is pressed towards said barrel, the driver moves said rod so that said plunger is advanced to dispense the food substance from the barrel.

According to the description in the specification, the spring may be a feature that distinguishes this cookie press over prior art cookie presses.The spring is located in the “escapement assembly 50″ but is not identified in Figure 3, reproduced below.

As explained in the patent “a disc 20 is positioned at the bottom of the cookie barrel. The disc 20 includes openings 21 arranged in a variety of patterns to form a template for dispensing cookie dough. A bottom cap 16 with an opening 17 therethrough secures the disc 20 to the bottom of the cookie barrel. … [C]ookie dough is dispensed through the openings 21 of the disc 20 when the lever 22 of FIGS. 1 and 2 is manipulated.” This makes it easy to make fancy-looking cookies like these:

Happy Holidays!

Article By Courtenay C. Brinckerhoff of Foley & Lardner LLP

Smartphone Wars – Supreme Court Awakens: Samsung Files Petition for Certiorari in New Hope to Harmonize Design Patent Law

On Monday, in the latest episode of the smartphone wars, Samsung filed a petition for certiorari with the Supreme Court.

Smartphone Wars

Samsung is appealing a Federal Circuit decision that upheld a $399 million judgment against Samsung for infringing three of Apple’s design patents. Samsung argues that the decision, if left unchecked by the Supreme Court, could dramatically increase the value of design patents. While the Supreme Court is the ultimate power in patent jurisprudence, it was a long time ago that it last considered a design patent case; more than 120 years ago according to Samsung. Samsung’s petition presents two fundamental questions concerning design patents:

1. Where a design patent includes unprotected non-ornamental features, should a district court be required to limit that patent to its protected ornamental scope?

2. Where a design patent is applied to only a component of a product, should an award of infringer’s profits be limited to those profits attributable to the component?

With respect to the first question – whether a district court should be required to limit the protection of a design patent to only ornamental features – Samsung argues that the Federal Circuit’s decision conflicts with both Section 171 of the Patent Act and with the Supreme Court’s precedent requiring judicial construction of patent claims.

According to Samsung, the Federal Circuit refusal “to cabin design patents to their protected ornamental scope” conflicts with Section 171 and allows infringement to be “found based on the use of nonornamental attributes.” Thus, argues Samsung, the Federal Circuit broadened the protectable scope of design patents, which are limited to “any new, original and ornamental design for an article of manufacture,” under section 171. Samsung argues the Federal Circuit’s ruling also creates tension with other areas of intellectual property law that routinely enforce limitations to protectable scope, such as copyright doctrine of “filtration” and trademark law’s doctrine of functionality.

Samsung also maintains that the ruling is contrary to Supreme Court precedents in the analogous context of utility patents, which recognize that district courts have a duty to construe patent claims and eliminate unprotected features. In Samsung’s view, similar to a Markman hearing, a district court should instruct a jury to identify non-ornamental features of a design patent and exclude them from the infringement analysis.

Turning to the second question – whether damages should be limited to the profits attributable to the infringing component – Samsung argues that the Federal Circuit’s decision conflicts with Section 289 of the Patent Act and the basic principles of causation and equity.

Samsung urges that “the Federal Circuit’s holding as a matter of law that an infringer of a design patent is liable for all of the profits it made from its entire product, no matter how little the design contributed to the product’s value or sales” be corrected. Samsung argues that the Federal Circuit’s conclusion that the article of manufacture is the entire smartphone, and not specific subcomponents, is wrong based on a natural reading and purpose of Section 289 of the Patent Act, contemporary extrinsic evidence regarding the definition of “articles of manufacture,” and non-controlling case law (see note below).

According to Samsung, the Federal Circuit’s “interpretation of Section 289 also flies in the face of well-settled tort principles of causation” and “ignores that disgorgement of the defendant’s profits is a classic equitable remedy for which the accepted measure of recovery generally is ‘the net profit attributable to the underlying wrong.’” “The cardinal principle of damages in Anglo-American law is that of compensation for the injury caused to plaintiff by defendant’s breach of duty,” This is the backdrop in which Section 289 was adopted. “Where disgorgement is available in patent cases, it has [] been ‘given in accordance with the principles governing equity jurisdiction, not to inflict punishment but to prevent an unjust enrichment by allowing injured complainants to claim ‘that which … is theirs, and nothing beyond this.’”

Samsung claims that certiorari should be granted because the Federal Circuit’s decision dramatically increases the value of design patents relative to other forms of intellectual property. Without correction, design patents will have whatever scope juries choose to give them, and a design-patent holder will be entitled to the infringer’s profits on the entire product even if the patented design applies only to a part of the product, and contributes to only a minor faction of the overall value. The Federal Circuit’s decision allows design patent owners to obtain the infringer’s total profits – a remedy not available under utility-patent law. Samsung contends that such leverage “poses a real danger for companies everywhere,” that it will lead to an “explosion of design patent assertions and lawsuits.”

Will the Supreme Court agree with Samsung that the Federal Circuit has caused a great disturbance in design patent jurisprudence? Difficult to see. Always in motion is the future.

Bush & Lane Piano Co. v. Becker Bros., 222 F. 902, 904 (2d Cir. 1915), (allowed an award of infringer’s profits from the patented design of a piano case but not from the sale of the entire piano, holding that “recovery should be confined to the subject of the patent.”); Young v. Grand Rapids Refrigerator Co., 268 F. 966 (6th Cir. 1920), (Affirmed the denial of all profits from the sale of refrigerators where the infringed patent related only to the design of the refrigerator’s door latch, explaining that it was not even “seriously contended” that the patentee could recover all profits from sales of refrigerators containing that latch.)

Article By, Patrick T. Driscoll, James Wodarski, Michael T. Renaud & Michael C. Newman of Mintz, Levin, Cohn, Ferris, Glovsky and Popeo, P.C.

Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. and Samsung Electronics America, Inc. v. E-Watch, Inc: Decision Denying Institution IPR2015-00612

Takeaway: The Board does not have the authority to determine whether an application was abandoned or improperly revived when determining whether a challenged claim is entitlted to claim priority to a an earlier-filed application.

In its Decision, the Board denied institution and determined that Petitioner had not demonstrated a reasonable likelihood of prevailing in showing the unpatentability of any of the challenged claims (claims 1-15) of the ’871 Patent. The ’871 Patent relates to “image capture and transmission systems and is specifically directed to an image capture, compression, and transmission system for use in connection with land line and wireless telephone systems.”

The Board reviewed the only asserted ground of unpatentability – that claims 1-15 of the ’871 Patent are anticipated by Monroe. The Board discussed whether Monroe is prior art. Monroe was published on July 15, 1999. The ’871 Patent issued from an application filed on January 3, 2003, which is a divisional of an application filed on January 12, 1998. Petitioner argued that the claims of the ’871 Patent are not entitled to the filing date of the 1998 “parent” application because of a lack of co-dependency between the parent and the divisional/child application. The Board stated that if Petitioner had argued that the parent application does not support the subject matter of the challenged claims in the divisional patent, then Patent Owner would have had to show that the challenged claims are entitled to an earlier filing date. However, Petitioner instead challenged co-pendency, which the Board noted was an attack on a petition decision in 2003 by the PTO reviving the parent divisional application when the child application was filed. Petitioner argued that the parent application was “purposefully” abandoned and should not have been revived.

The Board noted that Petitioner has not identified proper jurisdiction of the Board to review the 2003 decision or to ignore that decision and make its own determination about whether the parent application should have been revived. The Board stated it has the power to determine whether a patent owner can antedate a reference but that the status of an application as abandoned or revived is procedural and the Board does not have the ability to review such an action. Therefore, the Board found that Petitioner had not shown that Monroe constitutes prior art.

Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. and Samsung Electronics America, Inc. v. E-Watch, Inc., IPR2015-00612
Paper 8: Decision Denying Institution
Dated: July 8, 2015
Before: Jameson Lee, Gregg I. Anderson, Matthew R. Clements
Written by: Clements
Related Proceedings: IR2015-00541; IPR2014-00439; IPR2014-00987; IPR2015-00402; IPR2015-00404; IPR2015-00406; IPR2015-00411; IPR2015-00412; IPR2015-00413; IPR2015-00610

Is the SCOTUS Rule of Reason Unreasonable?

“Not too hard, not too soft,” says the Supreme Court in FTC v. Actavis, 133 S. Ct. 2223 (2013). The majority tries to reach middle ground by rejecting both the FTC’s argument that any reverse payment in settlement of a patent claim is presumptively unlawful and Actavis’ argument that any settlement within the scope of the patent is permissible, but is the court’s new “rule of reason” approach really “just right?” Let’s see how this plays out in a simple scenario using a product whose success everyone loves to hate—the Snuggie.

Meet Peter. He has a pug with whom he likes to spend his evenings, wrapped up in a Snuggie, watching movies and sharing popcorn. Peter was quite dismayed, though, to see his poor little pug shivering and cold without a Snuggie of his own. So, Peter invented the Puggie. He used special fibers formulated specifically to maintain heat while resisting odors because no one likes a smelly dog blanket. Peter even obtained a patent on his Puggie and began producing more to sell around his neighborhood, the Franklin Terrace Community. Once word spread of Peter’s success, however, several of Peter’s neighbors began producing competing products—the Pug Pelt, the Schnauzzie, and so on–which boasted the same odor-resistant properties as Peter’s Puggie.

Outraged, Peter publicly accused his competitors of patent infringement and demanded that they stop producing their “piddly dog pelts.” But they refused, claiming their fibers were different. Knowing how costly an extensive fiber dispute could be, Peter offered his competitors $1,000 to stop producing their competing pelts for a period of two years. The other pelt producers agreed, took the money, and stopped production immediately. The Franklin Terrace Community, however, was not pleased. Peter had not only run off the competition, but he had also bumped the Puggie price up afterward, making a killing during the chilly winter as the sole pelt producer. Community members petitioned the homeowners’ board for some guidance on whether Peter’s payment constituted an unfair trade practice. Peter opposed the petition and claimed that he had the right to pay whatever amount he deemed fit to protect his patent.

The board found the community’s argument that any “reverse settlement” payment by a patent holder is presumptively unlawful to be too harsh. Peter’s assertion, however, that any payment is immune from attack so long as it remains within the scope of the patent was believed to be too soft. Peter complained that the money and time he would have to commit to an extensive patent lawsuit over his odor-resistant fibers would put him out of business, but the board believed that his willingness to drop a grand to keep his competitors at bay was a much more accurate representation of Peter’s confidence in his patent. Specifically, the board found Peter’s payment of $1,000 to be a “strong indicator of power.” In an effort to come up with a more “middle of the road” approach, the board created the “rule of reason” to determine the legality of reverse settlement payments. No real guidance was provided, though, on how to apply the new rule—just not too hard, not too soft.

Without any elaboration on how this new “rule of reason” is to be applied in antitrust lawsuits, did the board cause more confusion than clarity? And, how large must a reverse settlement payment be to stand as an “indicator of power” and “lack of confidence” in the patent? If Peter’s patent was iron-clad and his competitors were infringing, should he have had the right to pay any amount he deemed fit to protect his patent, or was $1,000 too much for some piddly pooch pelts? Does this unfairly prohibit Peter from settling litigation that he may see as too costly or damaging? Or, does the need to protect consumers from the Puggie monopoly Peter created outweigh Peter’s patent rights?

It is hard to say exactly what effect the Supreme Court’s “rule of reason” decision in FTC v. Actavis will have on future antitrust litigation. We are likely to see an increase in the number of antitrust suits that are tried as opposed to settled. What do you make of this amorphous, middle-of-the-road approach?

ARTICLE BY Annie Dike of IMS ExpertServices

DNA Sequencing Patents: Simultaneous Invention As Secondary Evidence Of Obviousness

I do not usually write about non-precedential Federal Circuit decisions, but I could not let the discussion of “simultaneous invention” in Columbia University v. Illumina, Inc., go without comment. As if protecting patents from a hindsight-based determination of obviousness is not challenging enough, this theory holds that subsequent invention by another relatively soon after the invention at issue can support a finding of obviousness.

The Columbia University DNA Sequencing Patents

The patents at issue were three DNA sequencing patents: U.S. Patent No. 7,713,698; U.S. Patent No. 8,088,575; and U.S. Patent No. 7,790,869. Illumina challenged selected claims of the patents in Inter Partes Review (IPR) proceedings, and the USPTO Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) found all challenged claims anticipated or obvious over the asserted prior art references.

The Obviousness Issue

The Federal Circuit opinion was authored by Judge Wallach and joined by Chief Judge Prost and Judge Schall.

As summarized in the Federal Circuit opinion, the claims at issue “involve modified nucleotides that contain: (1) a labeled base; (2) a removable 3’-OH cap; and (3) a deazasubstituted base.” Columbia argued that “‘it would not have been obvious … to use ‘a reversible chain-terminating nucleotide with a label attached to the base, rather than to the cap on the 3’-OH group of the sugar.’”

After reviewing the prior art, the court found substantial evidence to support the PTAB’s findings regarding the disclosures of the asserted prior art references and reasonable expectation of success. It is in its discussion of secondary considerations of non-obviousness that the court discusses “simultaneous invention”:

“Independently made, simultaneous inventions, made within a comparatively short space of time, are persuasive evidence that the claimed apparatus was the product only of ordinary mechanical or engineering skill.” George M. Martin Co. v. Alliance Mach. Sys. Int’l LLC, 618 F.3d 1294, 1305 (Fed. Cir. 2010) ….

*****

As a secondary consideration … simultaneous invention is relevant when it occurs within a short space of time from the date of invention, and “is strong evidence of what constitutes the level of ordinary skill in the art.” Ecolochem v. S. Cal. Edison Co., 227 F.3d 1361, 1379 (Fed. Cir. 2000). Unlike the ultimate determination of obviousness, which requires courts to answer the hypothetical question of whether an invention “would have been obvious,” 35 U.S.C. § 103, simultaneous invention demonstrates what others in the field actually accomplished.

On the facts before it, the court noted that “Illumina did not present its simultaneous invention argument to the PTAB,” and because “the record is not fully developed, the evidence of simultaneous invention as a whole weighs only modestly in favor of obviousness.”

Why cite it as a factor at all if it wasn’t raised in the PTAB proceedings on appeal?

Simultaneous Invention

I traced the theory of “simultaneous invention” through the cases cited in the Federal Circuit decision.

In George M. Martin Co., the Federal Circuit already had determined that the district court had “correctly concluded as a matter of law that the differences between the prior art and the claimed improvement were minimal,” before it discussed “simultaneous invention.” Even then, it discussed it with this caveat:

Independently made, simultaneous inventions, made “within a comparatively short space of time,” are persuasive evidence that the claimed apparatus “was the product only of ordinary mechanical or engineering skill.” Concrete Appliances Co. v. Gomery, 269 U.S. 177, 184, 46 S.Ct. 42, 70 L.Ed. 222 (1925). But see Lindemann Maschinenfabrik GMBH v. Am. Hoist & Derrick Co., 730 F.2d 1452, 1460 (Fed. Cir. 1984) (“Because the statute, 35 U.S.C. § 135, (establishing and governing interference practice) recognizes the possibility of near simultaneous invention by two or more equally talented inventors working independently, that occurrence may or may not be an indication of obviousness when considered in light of all the circumstances.”).

In Ecolochem, the Federal Circuit discussed “simultaneous invention” in the context of reflecting the level of ordinary skill in the art, not obviousness per se:

The fact of near-simultaneous invention, though not determinative of statutory obviousness, is strong evidence of what constitutes the level of ordinary skill in the art.” The Int’l Glass Co. v. United States, 187 Ct.Cl. 376, 408 F.2d 395, 405 (1969). “[T]he possibility of near simultaneous invention by two or more equally talented inventors working independently, … may or may not be an indication of obviousness when considered in light of all the circumstances.” Lindemann, 730 F.2d at 1460, 221 USPQ at 487.

In the pre-Patent Act 1925 decision in Concrete Appliances Co., the Supreme Court noted that “[t]he several elements in the petitioners’ claims which we have enumerated embrace familiar devices long in common use, separately or in smaller groups, both in this and in kindred mechanical arts. It is not argued that there is any novelty in such units or groups; and the only serious question presented is whether, in combination in the apparatus described, they constitute an invention.” The Court then discussed numerous examples of similar devices made around the same time as the invention at issue before it explained:

The adaptation independently made by engineers and builders of these familiar appliances to the movement and distribution of wet concrete in building operations and the independent patent applications, within a comparatively short space of time, for devices for that purpose are in themselves persuasive evidence that this use in combination of well known mechanical elements was the product only of ordinary mechanical or engineering skill and not of inventive genius.

This appears to be the genesis of “simultaneous invention.”

Now that U.S. patent applicants are becoming accustomed to the importance of being the “first inventor to file” under the America Invents Act, do they also have to worry about how many file after them?

ARTICLE BY Courtenay C. Brinckerhoff of Foley & Lardner LLP

Mixing Things Up: Let’s Talk Recipes, Part Two of a Four-Part Series (Patent)

Discussions about protecting intellectual property often focus on cutting-edge technologies, corporate branding campaigns, and widely distributed artistic works like movies and music. But let’s mix things up a bit. Follow us through this four-part series as we answer a question that is sure to hit home for anyone with taste buds—can you protect a food recipe? In Part 1, here, we examined whether food recipes are eligible for copyright protection.

We concluded that, although a recipe itself is not eligible, you can claim copyrights in certain commentary, illustrations, or other expressive elements used to present the recipe. Here, in Part 2, we investigate whether patent protection offers a viable solution for chefs, bakers, restaurateurs, and others hoping to safeguard their culinary creations. Later, in Parts 3 and 4, we will break down whether recipes are eligible for trade secret protection (Part 3) or trademark/trade dress protection (Part 4).

PART 2: Can you Patent a Recipe?

To qualify for patent protection, an invention must be useful, new, and nonobvious. See 35 U.S.C. §§ 101-103. It must also fall into one of the Patent Act’s defined categories of “patent-eligible subject matter” (some things are outright barred from receiving patent protection, such as a mathematical algorithm). See 35 U.S.C. § 101. To warrant patent protection, a recipe must satisfy all four requirements.

On the “patent-eligible subject matter” front, a recipe would need to qualify as either a “process,” a “machine,” a “manufacture,” or a “composition of matter.” See 35 U.S.C. § 101. Of those categories, we can safely eliminate “machine” as a potential candidate and focus on the remaining possibilities.

A “process” is “a mode of treatment of certain materials to produce a given result. It is an act, or series of acts, performed upon the subject-matter to be transformed and reduced to a different state or thing.”Gottschalk v. Benson, 409 U.S. 63, 70 (1972). Most recipes are essentially a set of step-by-step instructions for combining specified ingredients to produce a dish or food product. Thus, as a “series of acts” that transforms ingredients into a different end product, a recipe could constitute a patent-eligible “process.”

A “manufacture,” more commonly called “an article of manufacture,” is “an article produced from raw or prepared materials by giving to these materials new forms, qualities, properties, or combinations, whether by handlabor or by machinery.” Diamond v. Chakrabarty, 447 U.S. 303, 308 (1980). A recipe itself does not qualify as an article of manufacture, but many consumer food products created according to a recipe likely qualify (think Hot Pockets® sandwiches, for example).

A “composition of matter” is “all compositions of two or more substances and all articles, whether they be the results of chemical union, or of mechanical mixture, or whether they be gases, fluids, powders or solids, for example.” Chakrabarty, 447 U.S. at 308. Most recipes—a basic cake batter recipe, for instance—call for the mechanical or chemical mixture of “fluids” and “powders or solids” (e.g., water and flour). Accordingly, although a recipe is not a “composition of matter,” the end product could be.

Thus, a recipe can be a patent-eligible process, while a resulting dish or food product can be a patent-eligible article of manufacture or composition of matter. But whether or not a recipe is patent-eligible subject matter is only one of four hurdles along the road to patent protection. The recipe must also be useful, new, and nonobvious. The bar for what counts as “useful” under the Patent Act is low and, as a result, virtually every recipe will satisfy the usefulness requirement.

When it comes to demonstrating that a recipe is “new” and “nonobvious,” however, the road gets much tougher. Every recipe seeking patent protection must distinguish itself from the millions of recipes that preceded it (eating is, after all, one of our most basic needs). Not only are multitudes of recipes already known, but in many cases the properties and effects of the underlying ingredients are also well-known. Adding a roux to a soup, for example, will predictably thicken the soup. Adding chocolate chips to a cake recipe will predictably increase the likelihood that the resulting cake will taste like, well, chocolate. When examining patent applications, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office often views the results obtained from combining well-understood ingredients as having been predictable or obvious to people of ordinary skill in the culinary arts.

But take heart, innovative foodies, because the Patent Office does occasionally grant patents for recipes, dishes, and food products. Many of them involve an unconventional step, ingredient, or end product. Check out, for instance, U.S. patent number 5,894,027 titled Milk and protein powder-coated cereal products; U.S. patent number 8,147,893 titled Refrigerator stable pressurized baking batter; U.S. patent number 5,510,137 titled Sweet ice stuffs and jellied foods; or U.S. patent number 8,236,366 titled Flavorful Waterless Coffee. As the Patent Office recently put it, “[i]f you look at most of these patents, you’ll find that the recipe was more likely to have been created in a laboratory than on a kitchen counter.” Larry Tarazano. Can Recipes Be Patented? United States Patent and Trademark Office. InventorsEye 4:3 (June 2013). With the popularity of modernist techniques like “molecular gastronomy” on the rise (molecular gastronomy focuses on transforming physical and chemical properties to produce new tastes and textures), we could see a slight uptick in recipe patents in the coming years.

In short, returning to our original question—can you patent a food recipe?—the answer is “yes, if you can overcome the difficult nonobviousness hurdle.” Stay tuned for the next part of our series as we investigate the benefits of safeguarding a recipe under the banner of trade secret protection.

ARTICLE BY Kyle N. Siegal of Lewis Roca Rothgerber LLP

In Light of Supreme Court’s Spider-Man Case, Which Antitrust Precedents are Ripe for Overturning?

On June 22, 2015, the US Supreme Court in Kimble v. Marvel Entertainment LLC declined on stare decisis grounds to overturn a criticized intellectual property precedent on royalty payments. In both the majority and dissenting opinions, the justices said that their respect for precedent would have been less had it been one interpreting the Sherman Antitrust Act. These comments prompt the question: Which old and criticized antitrust precedent might be subject to reversal?

Kimble had a patent on a device that allowed a user to shoot webs—really, just pressurized foam string—from the palm of his hand. Kimble and Spider-Man’s owner, Marvel, reached an agreement that allowed Marvel to sell such toys in exchange for a lump sum payment to Kimble plus a 3% annual royalty that had no end date. After years of payments, Marvel discovered Brulotte v. Thys Co., a 1964 Supreme Court case that had read the patent laws to prevent a patent owner from receiving royalties for sales made after the patent’s expiration. The Court considered such arrangements illegal per se because they were attempts to extend the patent’s monopoly beyond the patent’s life. Relying on that precedent, Marvel convinced lower courts that its payments to Kimble should stop with the 2010 expiration of the patent.

Kimble asked the Court to overturn Brulotte and replace it with a rule of reason analysis. Six justices declined that invitation, saying the long-standing precedent was based on an interpretation of patent statutes that Congress could, but had declined to, amend and that contracting parties might have relied on. The dissent would have overturnedBrulotte because its rationale was based on now-discredited antitrust policy, not statutory interpretation.

Perhaps more interesting to antitrust practitioners, the two opinions discussed the lower level of respect for the Court’s antitrust precedents. As the majority opinion pointed out, Congress “intended [the Sherman Act’s] reference to ‘restraint of trade’ to have ‘changing content,’ and authorized courts to oversee the term’s ‘dynamic potential.’” As a result, the Court has “felt relatively free to revise our legal analysis as economic understanding evolves.” The dissent agreed, saying “we have been more willing to reexamine antitrust precedents because they have attributes of common-law decisions.”

Given that seeming-unanimity on the weakness of antitrust precedents, the next obvious question for antitrust lawyers is which antitrust precedents might be overturned. One candidate is the so-called baseball exemption. In 1922’s Federal Baseball Club v. National League, the Court found that the “business [of] giving exhibitions of base ball” did not constitute interstate commerce and so was not reached by the Sherman Act. Commentators and even subsequent Court opinions have termed the decision an “anomaly” (though refusing to overturn it). Even retired Justice Stevens criticized the breadth of the exemption in a recent speech. In reaching this conclusion, Stevens relied on his experience on the Court, his early representation of the former A’s owner, and his work for Congress in the 1950s as it studied the exemption. Yet, while lower court decisions and The Curt Flood Act of 1998 have narrowed its scope, the exemption is still very much alive and has been used recently to cut short actions involving both the Cubs and the A’s. The Court could revisit the exemption yet again if it accepts the cert petition from the City of San Jose in the case involving the latest possible relocation of the A’s franchise.

Another candidate is the per se rule against tying, the only remaining vertical restraint to which the per se rule applies. In a tying arrangement, a seller agrees to sell one product (“tying product”) but only on the condition that the buyer also purchase a different product (“tied product”). Early Court cases applied the per se rule and described the arrangements harshly, saying they “serve hardly any purpose beyond the suppression of competition.” More recently, the Court has recognized that tying might be pro-competitive in certain circumstances. It has retained a rule that it calls per se; however, unlike per se rules against horizontal price fixing and the like, the tying per se rule requires proof of the seller’s power in the market for the tying product. If an appropriate case reaches the Court, it might complete the evolution of vertical restraints analysis and make all tying arrangements subject only to the rule of reason.

Finally, the Court’s 1963 Philadelphia National Bank opinion has faced severe criticism. In that case, the Court found that a merger that “produces a firm controlling an undue percentage share of the relevant market, and results in a significant increase in the concentration of firms” is presumptively anticompetitive. While that presumption has been significantly weakened in the various iterations of the DOJ/FTC Horizontal Merger Guidelines, it still plays a role at least when the agencies challenge a merger in court. FTC Commissioner Wright has called it bad law based on outdated economics and has criticized its continued use by the agencies. DOJ Assistant Attorney General Bill Baer, on the other hand, has called the presumption a useful tool for the agencies when challenging mergers in court. Because so few merger cases go beyond the preliminary injunction standard, let alone all the way to the Supreme Court, this precedent might remain safe.

ARTICLE BY Steven J. Cernak, Gregory L. Curtner & William M. Hannay

New Amendments to USPTO Post-Grant Regulations

O US-PatentTrademarkOffice-Seal n May 19, 2015, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) issued a final rule amending its regulations that apply to post-grant proceedings. These new rules deal with ministerial changes such as increasing page limits and making the regulations reflect the current practices used by the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB).

A second set of rule changes—to be issued later this year—will be more substantive and issued in proposed form first with an opportunity for public comment. We will issue an On the Subject when the second set of rules is issued, and we will be happy to assist with the submission of any comments. Below is a brief overview of the major provisions of this first amendment to the regulations.

Motions to Amend. The page limit for motions to amend, and oppositions to motions to amend, is increased from 15 pages to 25 pages. The required claim listing may now be made in an appendix accompanying the motion to amend, and the appendix is not counted toward the 25-page limit.
Petitioner’s Reply Brief. The page limit for the petitioner’s reply to patent owner’s response after institution is increased from 15 pages to 25 pages.
Font Style. All filings must be in 14-point, Times New Roman proportional font.
Back-Up Counsel. The rules are modified to make it clear that there can be more than one back-up counsel. There may be only one lead counsel.
Fees. The rules clarify that you must include in the number of claims in the petition when calculating the required fees each challenged claim as well as any claim from which a challenged claim depends, unless that claim is separately challenged. The USPTO explains that the claims from which the dependent claim depends must be construed along with the dependent claim.
Right to Depose. The rules make clear that routine or automatic discovery only includes affidavit testimony prepared for the post-grant proceeding. Consequently, if an affidavit is submitted from a district court proceeding, a motion must be filed to depose that affiant.
Objections to Evidence. The rule makes it clear that objections to evidence must be filed with the PTAB and served on opposing counsel.
Covered Business Method Proceedings. The rule explicitly provides that a covered business method proceeding may not be instituted where the petitioner filed a civil action challenging the validity of a claim of the patent before filing the petition. The change was made to track the statute.

ARTICLE BY Bernard Knight & Carey C. Jordan of McDermott Will & Emery

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