Ariad Pharm., Inc. v. Matal

283 F. Supp. 3d 503
CourtDistrict Court, E.D. Virginia
DecidedJanuary 5, 2018
DocketCase No. 1:17–cv–733
StatusPublished
Cited by1 cases

This text of 283 F. Supp. 3d 503 (Ariad Pharm., Inc. v. Matal) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering District Court, E.D. Virginia primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Ariad Pharm., Inc. v. Matal, 283 F. Supp. 3d 503 (E.D. Va. 2018).

Opinion

T. S. Ellis, III, United States District Judge

This is an appeal from a decision by the United States Patent & Trademark Office ("PTO"), calculating the patent term adjustment for United States Patent No. 8,114,874 (the " '874 Patent"), owned by plaintiff ARIAD Pharmaceuticals ("ARIAD"). Specifically, the PTO determined that the three month period, beginning with the PTO's erroneous conclusion that *505ARIAD had abandoned its patent application and ending when the PTO rescinded the notice of abandonment, constituted "time consumed by continued examination" pursuant to 35 U.S.C. § 154(b)(1)(B). Accordingly, the PTO excluded this four-month period from the patent term adjustment calculation. ARIAD argues that the PTO erred in excluding this four-month time period from its adjustment calculation because the continued examination had not yet commenced. This dispute has been fully briefed and argued and is now ripe for disposition.

I.

Congress in the past quarter century has significantly altered the patent law landscape in a manner particularly pertinent to this appeal. Thus, a brief description of this new landscape provides useful context and aids the analysis.

The patent process begins when an applicant seeking a United States patent files an application with the PTO. See 35 U.S.C. § 111. The PTO then conducts an examination of that application, reviewing the application first for procedural requirements and then referring the application to an examiner to determine whether the invention meets substantive patentability requirements. Id. §§ 101, 112, 103, 131. If the examiner determines the application does not meet patentability requirements and issues a final rejection, the applicant may file a request for continued examination ("RCE") of the application pursuant to 35 U.S.C. § 132(b). See 37 C.F.R. § 1.114. When an RCE is filed, the "Technology Center" assigned to the application initially processes the request and verifies that all the threshold requirements for continued examination are satisfied. See Manual of Patent Examining Procedure (" MPEP") § 706.07(h). If the requirements are not satisfied, the applicant is notified and afforded the opportunity to enter amendments. Id. Once the requirements are satisfied, the PTO will withdraw the finality of the preceding rejection and forward the RCE to the patent examiner for review. See 37 C.F.R. § 1.114(d).

If, at the end of this process, a patent issues, the patent term will last for twenty years from the date the initial patent application was filed. Prior to 1994, patent terms were seventeen years from the date the patent issued. In 1994, Congress changed the patent term to twenty years from the date the application was first filed. In changing the start date of the patent term to the date when the application was first filed, Congress noted that PTO delays in the processing of applications would now consume some portion of the patent term. Accordingly, to account for these delays, Congress passed the American Inventors Protection ("AIPA") of 1999, requiring the PTO to grant several patent term adjustments based on delays in the application processing attributable to the PTO. See 35 U.S.C. § 154(b). Specifically, there are three types of delays for which patentees are entitled to term adjustments: "A Delay;" "B Delay;" and "C Delay." "A Delay" extends the patent term one day for each day the PTO fails to meet prescribed deadlines for certain events during the processing and prosecution of the patent application, including deadlines for mailing notices of allowance, responding to replies under § 132, and issuing the patent after payment of the required fees. See 35 U.S.C. § 154(b)(1)(A). "B Delay" provides a guarantee of no more than three-years of application pendency from the time the application is filed to issuance of the patent. Id. § 154(b)(1)(B). "C Delay" extends the patent term one day for each day of the pendency of an interference proceeding, a secrecy order, or successful appellate review by the Board, or a Federal court. Id. § 154(b)(1)(C). Most relevant to this case is the PTO's calculation of "B Delay." As *506described above, "B Delay" accounts for delays "due to the failure of the [PTO] to issue a patent within [three] years after the actual filing date of the application ..." Id. § 154(b)(1)(B). The statute excludes certain time periods from the calculation of that three-year period of time, including "any time consumed by continued examination of the application requested by the applicant under section 132(b)." Id. § 154(b)(1)(B)(i).

In addition to establishing these categories of delay, the statute delegates to the PTO Director the authority to "prescribe regulations establishing procedures for the application for and determination of patent term adjustments ...." Id. § 154(b)(3)(A). Pursuant to this authority, the PTO promulgated a rule calculating the "time consumed by continued examination requested by the applicant" in 35 U.S.C.

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283 F. Supp. 3d 503, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/ariad-pharm-inc-v-matal-vaed-2018.