Court revives Apple, Google, Cisco challenge to U.S. patent-review policy

Apple, Google, Cisco, and others can sue the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to challenge a rule that reduced the number of patent-validity proceedings at a USPTO tribunal, a U.S. appeals court said Monday.

Blake Brittain for Reuters:

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit reversed a California federal court’s decision to dismiss the companies’ lawsuit and said the agency may have failed to go through a required public notice-and-comment rulemaking process.
The PTO’s Patent Trial and Appeal Board is popular with big tech companies that are often targeted with patent lawsuits and that use the board’s “inter partes review” process to contest patents they are accused of infringing. An internal rule that gave the agency’s judges greater discretion to deny inter partes review petitions “dramatically reduced access” to the process, the companies told the appeals court.
Apple, Google, Cisco, Intel Corp, and Edwards Lifesciences Corp sued the PTO in the California federal court in 2020 over the rule. They argued it undermined the role inter partes review plays in “protecting a strong patent system” and violated federal law.
Companies including Tesla, Honda, Comcast, and Dell filed briefs at the Federal Circuit in support of the plaintiffs.

MacDailyNews Note: The case is Apple Inc v. Vidal, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, No. 22-1249.
Please help support MacDailyNews. Click or tap here to support our independent tech blog. Thank you!
Shop The Apple Store at Amazon.

The post Court revives Apple, Google, Cisco challenge to U.S. patent-review policy appeared first on MacDailyNews.