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Federal Circuit: Collateral Estoppel Can Apply to Patents With Claims Similar To Those in Previously Litigated, Related Patents
On Oct. 3, 2017, a Federal Circuit panel of Judges Newman, Clevenger, and Chen issued a per curium decision in In re Lakshmi Arunachalam, No. 2016-1607 (Fed. Cir. 2017). Because claims of a later patent were not “materially different” than claims of a previously litigated patent, the patent owner was barred from re-litigating the issues due to collateral estoppel.
Lakshmi Arunachalam (Arunachalam) owns U.S. Patent No. 6,212,556 (the '556 patent), which is a continuation-in-part of U.S. Patent No. 5,987,500 (the '500 patent). Arunachalam appealed the Patent Trial and Appeal Board's (PTAB) ruling that certain claims of the '556 patent were unpatentable as either anticipated or obvious. The Federal Circuit found that the claims of the '556 patent were “not materially different” from claims of the '500 patent that were previously invalidated by a district court. Id. at 2. The Federal Circuit also noted that those claims were not “materially different from other patent claims of Dr. Arunachalam's in which [the court] applied collateral estoppel to bar her from challenging a prior Board unpatentability decision.” Id.
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