35 USC 287: Marking inventions

Remember to mark your products!

To avoid damaging your patent rights, mark your products with patent numbers. The law covers devices but not methods, so marking software is a bit tricky.

You probably have noticed that some products are marked with the word “patent” and a list of patent numbers. These are usually written in small type somewhere on the product or on its packaging. If you (as a patent holder) are planning to start producing your own patented products, what happens if you don’t include this marking?

Because it is hard to tell what is and isn’t patented, Congress passed the 35 USC 287 statute (Federal law) to protect the public from accidental patent infringement. The law holds that absent such marking, your ability to recover past damages from an infringer can be very limited.  For example, past damages may only extend back to the time that you first sent a notice letter to the infringer. This law also covers your patent licensees (who often forget such markings) as well, so remember this for license negotiations.  Otherwise, your licensee could end up damaging your rights.

Although traditionally actual patent numbers had to be marked on the product, a few years ago it became OK to just use “virtual marking”. Here, just marking “patent or pat”, followed by a publically accessible web page address, is enough.  Virtual marking has advantages, but make sure the web page is actually “up”.

To prevent inadvertent loss of rights, it may seem safer to always err on the side of marking, but don’t overdo it.  There is a different law, 35 USC 292, designed to protect the public against false patent marking. So the general rule of thumb is to try to provide adequate patent notice, but avoid being deceptive.

35 USC 287 has some “bugs” and “features”

Bugs: Untended consequence — the law somewhat favors patent trolls. A patent holder who doesn’t produce anything (and hence has nothing to mark) can still recover past damages from up to six years earlier.

Features: Because it is hard to affix a mark to a method, 35 USC 287 generally doesn’t apply to methods patents.

But what about software and software implemented inventions? Software patents often contain a mixture of methods claims and device claims. However, software typically runs on (or is stored in) some sort of physical object. So is software covered by 35 USC 287 or not?  If so, what to mark, and how to mark it? What about websites and apps?

The courts have not been consistent here, and the law is still evolving. However, a fair number of court cases have required marking. It is safest to assume that patent marking is likely required, and then examine legal aspects as they apply to the specifics of your situation.

Thales patent eligibility ruling

HMD display
Not the Thales Head Mounted Display!

A recent Federal Circuit case, Thales Visionix Inc. v United States, continues the process of restoring sanity to the ongoing “Alice” patent eligibility mess.

As previously discussed, since the Supreme Court’s 2014 “Alice” decision, patent law has been burdened with an unworkable “is it abstract?” test for patent eligibility. This test is similar to a medieval test to determine witches:  Step 1:determine if the test subject is a witch abstract”;  Step 2:if so, does the witch float? is there something more?”

The Federal Circuit, charged with cleaning up patent law, has been slowly chipping away at this nonsense. In two earlier cases (Enfish and Rapid Litigation), the Federal Circuit established at least a few reasonable step 1 rules (such as read the entire claim), and now we have another.

Thales Visionix had a patent on a motion-tracking Head Mounted Display (HMD).  This patent claimed a HMD arrangement of inertial sensors and signal processing elements, used in the F-35 fighter jet. Any enemy pilot blown up by this HMD system might not consider this to be “abstract”, but a lower US court was not so easily impressed. They used their own “Alice: it’s abstract” weapon to shot down the HMD patent.

In the absence of rules (the Supreme Court thoughtfully declined to provide any), lower courts have often used a type of “guilt by association” logic, where if a given patent claim has some elements in common with another claim previously ruled to be abstract, then that claim is also abstract. The lower court argued that the Thales patent claims were abstract because the claims allegedly “used mathematical equations (previously determined to be abstract) for determining the relative position of a moving object to a moving reference frame”.

However the Federal Circuit disagreed.  They determined that just because a claim contains a patent ineligible (abstract) concept (e.g. mathematical equations) does not mean that the entire claim is (step 1) “abstract.” Rather, the question is if the patent ineligible concept (math, natural law) is being used to improve some other technique. If so, then the claim as a whole is not abstract. This is similar to their earlier, more biotech-focused, ruling in the Rapid Litigation case.

So as a medieval logic analogy, just because a woman has a cat does not automatically mean that the woman is a witch, if the cat is unusually good at catching mice. If improved mouse catching can be shown, the step 1 conclusion is that the woman is not a witch. There is no need to go on and subject the poor woman to a step 2 “witch float” test.  This is good, because there is a high casualty rate at step 2.