On May 29, 2024, the Western District of Oklahoma in SIPCO, LLC v. JASCO Prods. Co. dismissed the plaintiff SIPCO’s patent infringement claims against defendant JASCO because of a minor typo made by the USPTO during prosecution.

As 2024 begins and intellectual property (IP) strategies are being developed for the new year, it is a good time to reflect on what IP issues were prominent in 2023. According to many readers, hot IP topics included patent litigation strategies, artificial intelligence (AI), and pharmaceutical-related patent applications.

Patent offices may reject a patent application with claims reciting using a composition to treat a disease, based on the requirement that the claimed treatment is not fully supported by the application.

Innovators developing IP strategies for 2023 are reflecting on last year’s key IP issues, including entity size designations for US patent applications, erasures of patent damage awards due to flawed expert opinions, and developments involving the ITC, artificial intelligence and machine learning, and inter partes reviews.

In 2021 the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) developed an Artificial Intelligence (AI) based prototype search system for use by examiners during examination of patent applications. The USPTO found searching success with the prototype, for the USPTO just launched an AI-based “Similarity Search” in the Patents End-to-End (PE2E) prior art search suite for patents examiners.

At the time of filing any patent application with the United States and Patent Trademark Office (USPTO), patent applicants must designate their entity status.  Selecting the correct entity status can significantly reduce costs, so it is important to determine the correct entity status and update the status as needed throughout a patent’s and patent application’s life.  There are three types of entity statuses: large, small, or micro, with small and micro entities being entitled to reduced USPTO fees