Patent Office ‘Fintiv’ Return Signals Patentee-Friendly Shift

The US Patent and Trademark Office’s move to make it easier for administrative judges to turn away validity challenges swings the pendulum back in favor of patent owners and away from the tech companies that are frequent targets of infringement lawsuits, attorneys said.

The change, announced in a Feb. 28 bulletin, scrapped a June 2022 guidance memo issued by former director Kathi Vidal that narrowed a controversial framework set up in the precedential Apple v. Fintiv decision, under which the agency’s Patent Trial and Appeal Board had discretion to turn away challenges to patents subject to parallel district ...