Drafting Patents for Litigation and Licensing, 2012 Cumulative Supplement

The 2012 Cumulative Supplement to Drafting Patents for Litigation and Licensingprovides significant updates and analysis of the latest cases, including:

• Leahy-Smith America Invents Act, impacting almost all areas of patent drafting, including earlier and more frequent patent filings due to the transition to a "first-inventor-to-file" regime
• Mayo Collaborative Services v. Prometheus Laboratories, involving the patentability of medical diagnostic tests
• Bilski v. Kappos, holding out the possibility that so-called "business method" inventions can be patented as long as they are not an abstract idea
• Stanford v. Roche, showing that an improperly drafted agreement between a university and one of its researchers divested the university of its patent rights
• Blackboard, Inc. v. Desire2Learn Inc., where the Federal Circuit held that patent applicants may not support a means-plus-function clause with the mere disclosure of "a black box that performs a recited function"
• The Federal Circuit's decisions in Muniauction Inc. v. Thomson Corp., Golden Hour Data Systems v. emsCharts Inc., and Akamai Technologies, Inc. v. Limelight Networks, focusing attention on drafting method claims in such a way that the method steps are performed solely by a single entity
• The en banc decision in Egyptian Goddess v. Swisa, completely overhauling the test for infringement of design patents
• Quanta Computer v. LG Electronics, which substantially expanded the patent exhaustion doctrine, and also raised questions about the rights of patent owners to control downstream uses of patented components
• The en banc decision in Ariad Pharmaceutical v. Eli Lilly, leading to the possibility that broad genus claims may be enabled, but not supported, by the written description of the patent