Tafas v. Dudas: USPTO Exceded Its Rulemaking Authority with Proposed Limitations on Continuations

All of my email lists are abuzz over the ruling in Tafas v. Dudas, which Patently-O covers much better than I ever could:

Patent Law Blog Patently-O: Tafas v. Dudas: PTOs Proposed Limitations on Continuations and Claims are Invalid

In a twenty-six page opinion, District Court Judge Cacheris has granted GSK’s and Tafas’s Motions for Summary Judgment — finding the PTO’s proposed limitations to the number of continuation applications and claims per patent to be improper extensions of PTO authority:

“Because the USPTO’s rulemaking authority under 35 U.S.C. § 2b2 does not extend to substantive rules, and because the Final Rules are substantive in nature, the Court finds that the Final Rules are void as ‘otherwise not in accordance with law’ and ‘in excess of statutory jurisdiction [and] authority.’ 5 U.S.C. § 7062.”

The documents:

About these ads

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

%d bloggers like this: