Court Probes Patent Office Dating of Dropped Applications (1)

The Federal Circuit on Thursday probed the US Patent and Trademark Office’s treatment of abandoned patent applications in validity challenges to later-issued patents.

Many of the hundreds of thousands of patent applications filed each year in the US are abandoned. Historically, the PTO has used applications—whether granted or dropped by the applicant—as “prior art” which can be used to deny subsequent applications or to challenge later-filed patents as wrongly granted in proceedings at the agency’s Patent Trial and Appeal Board.

Chicago-area patent owner Lynk Labs Inc. told a panel at the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit that ...