A cottage industry has developed around the so-called “rocket docket” of the Western District of Wisconsin, the speed of which has attracted plaintiffs in patent cases.

While everyone has been fixated on patent trolls, experts say a different breed of abusive intellectual-property litigants have been making a comeback: businesses that assert dubious patents for strategic reasons.

The U.S. Supreme Court held last week that some, but not all, computer-implemented software functions are too abstract to qualify for a patent.

In the last oral argument of the term, the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday took up a closely watched patent case that practitioners hoped would establish a standard for indirect patent infringement.

The justices of the U.S. Supreme Court are facing the difficult task of determining whether computer-implemented software programs that draw on non-computerized principles — a category that could encompass countless types of programs that are in use by millions of people — are eligible for patents.

The justices of the U.S. Supreme Court wrangled over the language of a statute that allows prevailing parties in certain patent infringement cases to recoup attorney fees — an issue that could mean millions of dollars in already costly legal proceedings.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Medtronic, Inc. v. Mirowski Family Ventures, LLC No. 12-1128, clarified the burden shifting framework for certain types of claims stemming from patent licensing agreements.

Toby Reynolds tried to avoid following in his lawyer father’s footsteps, but the pull of law was too strong.

In a decision that seemed designed to carve out a middle ground in the legal battle over whether companies can hold exclusive rights in the use of biological material, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Thursday that isolated human genes are not patentable, but synthetically created genetic material may be patented.

The Obama Administration has announced five executive actions and seven legislative proposals aimed at holding back the tsunami of litigation by patent trolls, and lawyers are weighing in on whether the recommendations will wall off the tidal waves or merely be sandbags on the shore.

The Kohler Co. has been ordered in federal court to pay $9.6 million to a Massachusetts manufacturer for infringing on two of its patents for components that reduce exhaust emissions in marine generators.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s surgically narrow ruling prohibiting a farmer from using seeds harvested from patented herbicide-resistant soybeans has left lawyers with more questions than answers about the extent of patent owners’ rights in other emerging, self-replicating technologies.

Patent pools, designed to spur innovation and reduce the cost of litigation, may actually be having anticompetitive effects according to a report released by the former competition policy director for the Federal Trade Commission.

Drawing a legal line to determine when human genetic material ceases to be a creation of nature and instead becomes a patentable product is not easy — even for the U.S. Supreme Court.

Portions of the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act of 2011, or the “AIA,” took effect earlier this month. It’s been called the most significant overhaul of U.S. patent law in decades.

DuPont officials plan to appeal a federal jury’s record-setting $1-billion verdict that found the company willfully infringed a patent held by Monsanto.

10-1219 Kappos v. Hyatt

10-844 Caraco Pharmaceutical Laboratories, Ltd., v. Novo Nordisk, A/S

10-1150 Mayo Collaborative Services v. Prometheus Laboratories, Inc.

Intellectual Property Patents; federal contractors The Bayh-Dole Act does not automatically vest title to federally funded  inventions in federal contractors or authorize contractors to unilaterally take  title to such inventions. Section 202(a), which states that contractors may “elect to retain title,”  confirms that the Act does not vest title. Stanford reaches the opposite  conclusion, but only because it reads “retain” ...

Intellectual Property Patents; induced infringement Induced infringement under 35 U.S.C. 271(b) requires knowledge that the induced acts constitute patent infringement. Induced infringement was not considered a separate theory of indirect liability in the pre-1952 case law, but was treated as evidence of “contributory infringement,” i.e., the aiding and abetting of direct infringement by another party. When Congress enacted §271,it separated ...

Over the past two years, patent attorneys have seen marked differences in the way patent applications are handled, and how a backlog of 700,000-plus filed patent applications are being tackled, by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.