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On June 12, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit (D.C. Circuit) affirmed a decision of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia in Seed Co. Ltd. v. Westerman, Hattori, Daniels & Adrian, LLP in a legal malpractice case resulting from the failure of lawyers from two different law firms, Westerman, Hattori, Daniels & Adrian, LLP (Westerman) and Kratz, Quintos & Hanson, LLP (Kratz), to file necessary documents in the plaintiffs’ patent case.

Recently, the USPTO published a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) to change the “Trial Practice at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board,” which is contained in Part 42 of Title 37 of the Code of Federal Regulations.

On June 1, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) published a notice in the Federal Register announcing that the agency was establishing a public docket for the receipt of public comments regarding the types of patent information published in the FDA’s Orange Book, a collection of FDA-approved drugs and their therapeutic equivalents designed to improve competition from generic drugmakers.

The COVID-19 pandemic seems to be coming to a slow but steady close in Europe, with no evidence of a spike despite loosening of lockdowns, at least according to outlets like the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal.

On June 9, the full Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing titled “COVID-19 Fraud: Law Enforcement’s Response to Those Exploiting the Pandemic.”

This week in Washington IP events, the Senate Financial Services Subcommittee focuses on Federal Communications Commission spectrum auction oversight while the House Transportation Committee marks up a major transportation bill that would heavily impact research and development in that sector.

It happened to Japan in the 1950s. Then it happened to Taiwan, and then Korea. Rapidly-developing countries started out relying on copying foreign technologies to drive their economies.

Patents involving antibody medicines (antibody patents) are largely grouped into patents specified by antibody amino acid sequences (antibody sequence-based patents) and those not (non-sequence-based patents).

This week in Other Barks & Bites: USPTO announces relief under the CARES Act for restoring priority/ benefit rights; the CJEU has ruled that “functional shapes” are eligible for copyright protection if they are original works; China’s IP agency releases its annual budget including details on reducing patent pendency times to nearly seven months shorter than the USPTO;

Over 15 years ago, as a Ph.D./J.D. student, I learned that the U.S. Congress intended patent-eligible subject matter to broadly include “anything under the sun that is made by man” when enacting the 1952 Patent Act, and that two cases, Diamond v. Chakrabarty, 447 U.S. 303 (1980) and Parke-Davis & Co. v. H.K. Mulford Co., 189 F. 95 (C.C.S.D.N.Y. 1911), had paved the way for the United States to become the world leader on biotechnology innovation.