Law360 highlighted 10 decisions over the last 10 years that significantly impacted the patent law community. The publication reached out to Finnegan partner James Barney for his thoughts on one of the decisions, Williamson v. Citrix Online.
In the 2015 decision, the en banc U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit eliminated the presumption that patents that do not contain the word "means" are immune from a certain type of indefiniteness argument frequently used against software patents. James said, “That opened the door to challenge a lot more claims under that rubric. The result is that more claims became vulnerable to indefiniteness attacks. ... We've definitely seen an uptick in the number of patents that are being held invalid.”
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