Hyatt v. USPTO: Mandamus Action Requesting an Impartial Administrative Review
Gilbert P. Hyatt v. USPTO and Iancu (E.D. Va. 2018) (Hyatt – Mandamus Action Complaint)
Hyatt has filed a new mandamus action against the USPTO as the next step in the 40+ year battle over his microcomputer patent applications. Hyatt has over 300 patents applications pending before the USPTO.
According to the complaint, “Most of Mr. Hyatt’s applications have been pending for over 20 years, with about a dozen pending for over 35 years and three applications pending for over 40 years.” The complaint details:
[In the 1990’s then Commissioner Bruce] Lehman and other PTO officials falsely branded Mr. Hyatt a ‘submariner’ and unlawfully decided that the PTO would never issue him another patent. . . . Having made that decision, the PTO proceeded to carry it out. It acted almost immediately to withdraw from issuance four patents either issued or in the final stages of being issued to Mr. Hyatt—actions in which the PTO has acknowledged the unusual participation of Commissioner Lehman and other senior PTO officials. It applied unlawful secret procedures (since acknowledged by the PTO) to block the issuance of applications that examiners found patentable. Internal PTO documents reveal that these unlawful procedures prevented issuance of at least several patents to Mr. Hyatt. It put more than 80 of Mr. Hyatt’s pending administrative appeals on ice for up to a decade before terminating them by reopening prosecution and restarting the examination process from scratch. It secretly used what PTO officials called “Shadow Art Units,” “Phantom Art Units,” and “parking lots” to stow Mr. Hyatt’s applications and take them off the books. And it delayed actions across the board, with a degree of creativity that bespeaks the PTO’s enmity for Mr. Hyatt: issuing suspensions amounting to over a millennium of aggregate delay; secretly assigning his applications to management personnel who do not examine applications; dismissing his petitions imploring the agency to act on the false basis that his applications were already being expedited; leaving approximately 100 of Mr. Hyatt’s applications for a single examiner to process in his personal time, without pay; and manipulating its reporting systems to hide its failure to act on Mr. Hyatt’s applications. All the while, PTO officials spread the word high and low throughout the agency that Mr. Hyatt was a “submariner” and that he would never get another patent, poisoning the well against him.
More recently, the PTO created the “Hyatt Unit . . . “for the purpose of miring all of Mr. Hyatt’s applications in administrative purgatory until Mr. Hyatt gives up or dies.”
The Hyatt Unit began its work by restarting prosecution from scratch, throwing out years of work and enormous effort by Mr. Hyatt in the process. It blanketed Mr. Hyatt in what its leader described as a “boatload” of hundreds of burdensome Office Actions in just a few months, forcing him to scramble to make any response. And now it is in the process of systematically abandoning and rejecting his applications, piling on numerous, overlapping rejections on every patent claim and entering frivolous “objections” that take years to correct due to the PTO’s refusal to decide his administrative petitions for relief on a timely basis or at all. . . The Hyatt Unit has never allowed a single one of Mr. Hyatt’s claims in its more than-5 years of existence.
Finally, in an attempt to eliminate all of Hyatt’s claims, the PTO asserted prosecution laches against all of Hyatt’s applications. That approach has seemingly now failed with a 2017 district court decision rejecting the PTO’s prosecution laches case.
In this action, Hyatt is looking for several forms of relief — perhaps most pointedly is a mandamus action from the court ordering the PTO “expeditiously to conduct a fair, impartial, and timely examination of his applications in accordance with law, to allow patentable subject matter, to issue patents claiming such patentable such subject matter upon payment of the issue fee, to provide timely action on Mr. Hyatt’s petitions, and to permit Mr. Hyatt to obtain timely final agency action on rejections from the Appeal Board.”
In addition, Hyatt is requesting compensation for post-GATT patent applications whose potential term have expired due to PTO delay and issuance of those patents.
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The complaint is an interesting read, but was filed partially under seal (based upon a protective order from a prior case), including the following paragraph:
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A separate proceeding is ongoing in DC Federal Court Hyatt v. Iancu, Nos. 05-2310, 09-1864, 09-1869, 09-1872 (D.D.C.). In a recent briefing, the PTO explained its contention regarding the bulk of Hyatt’s patents:
Mr. Hyatt filed a patent application in 1984 that describes, in over 650 pages of text and figures, a system for manipulating images on a screen by rotating, sliding, and zooming. His explanation includes something that he called a “window” that is in the computer’s memory and is not visible to the user. Mr. Hyatt amended his claims a number of times and, fifteen years later, in 1999, filed the claims that are now at issue. By 1999, the term “window” had taken on a much different and more valuable meaning in computing and to the general public. Mr. Hyatt’s claims now recite a type of window that is visible on the user’s screen, can be overlapped to run multiple applications at once, includes interactive features such as menus and icons, and allows the user to interact directly with the display monitor by, for example, clicking on a pull-down menu or choosing a menu option. Those claimed inventions are not described in Mr. Hyatt’s original specification, and that lack of written description means the claims have correctly been rejected by the USPTO and should also be rejected by this Court.
USPTO Proposed Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law [04e9202c-6214-442a-998d-3b74156ca79b]
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Example claim (1984 priority date):
Claim 131. A process comprising the acts of:
generating background image information;
generating a first window of three dimensional perspective image information;
overlaying the first window of three dimensional perspective image information onto the background image information;
generating a second window of three dimensional perspective image information;
overlaying the second window of three dimensional perspective image information onto the background image information overlapping with the first window of three dimensional perspective image information; and
displaying a background image overlaid by a first window of three dimensional perspective images and overlaid by an overlapping second
window of three dimensional perspective images in response to the background image information overlaid with the first window of three dimensional perspective image information and in response to the background image information overlaid with the overlapping second window of three dimensional perspective image information.