Stoll: Maintaining Post-Grant Review Estoppel in the America Invents Act: A Call for Legislative Restraint

In our newest Patently-O Patent Law Journal article, former Commissioner of Patents Robert Stoll considers and rejects the call for legislative reforms that would weaken the estoppel associated with post-grant review filings.  In the abstract, Stoll argues:

Critics of this [estoppel] provision seek to strike reasonably-could-have-raised estoppel as applied to subsequent civil litigation. This position is mistaken, because limiting the estoppel only to issues actually raised in the post-grant review would encourage petitioner gamesmanship to the detriment of (i) the courts, whose busy dockets will be burdened with more complex and time-consuming validity questions that the petitioner reasonably could and should have raised in the post-grant review, (ii) the USPTO, whose post-grant review decisions will lose their finality with respect to the same petitioner vis-à-vis a later court challenge, and (iii) the patent owner, who will be forced to defend the validity of the same patent claim against the same petitioner in piecemeal proceedings rather than in a single forum. Post-grant review estoppel, as originally enacted, should be maintained for these and other reasons discussed in this Article.

Read the article: Robert L. Stoll, Maintaining Post-Grant Review Estoppel in the America Invents Act: A Call for Legislative Restraint, 2012 Patently-O Patent Law Journal 1 at /media/docs/2012/11/stoll.2012.estoppel.pdf.