This case addresses two primary issues (i) whether the district court erred in construing the claim term "composition" in FMC's pesticide patents to mean only "stable compositions," based on disclosures found in a provisional application and a related patent, even though the asserted patents contained no stability language and (ii) whether the district court misapplied the preliminary injunction standard in rejecting Sharda's anticipation and obviousness defenses. Background FMC Corporation ("FMC") owns U.S. Patent Nos. [...]

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has entered a new chapter that could reshape how American inventors protect their ideas. In October, USPTO Director John Squires reclaimed direct authority over decisions to insti tute patent review proceedings, including inter partes reviews. (Editor's note: IPRs allow a third party to challenge the validity of one or more claims in an issued patent before the Patent Trial and Appeal Board.) For the first time in more than [...]

Recentive owns four patents related to television broadcast program scheduling optimization (US Patent Nos. 11,386,367; 11,537,960; 10,911,811; and 10,958,957). Belonging to two different families, all four patents nonetheless rely on machine learning techniques to carry out the claimed methods. As described by the specification of one of the patents, the claimed inventions could utilize "any suitable machine learning technology" including "a gradient boosted random forest, a regression, a neural network, a decision tree, a [...]