High Court Rejects Appeal of Fed. Cir. Double-Patenting Ruling

The US Supreme Court declined to take up a company’s challenge to US Patent & Trademark Office decisions canceling four patents that closely resembled an earlier filed one but received later expiration dates due to agency delays.

Cellect LLC argued its later patents deserved extra term length because PTO delays pushed back their issue dates. Ordinarily, a patent under such circumstances gets a term extension equal to the duration of the government-caused delay, under what a 1999 statute calls a “patent term adjustment.” But an examiner invalidated Cellect’s patents under the doctrine of “obviousness-type double patenting,” which bars inventors from ...