Thickness Arguments Cross the Line for Federal Circuit,PTAB Litigation Blog
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When issued patent drawings are not explicitly made to scale, the Federal Circuit recently confirmed that arguments relying solely or predominately on the features of those drawings, such as line thickness, are “unavailing.” The Regents of the University of California v. Satco Products, Inc., Appeal No. 2023-1356 (Fed. Cir. Dec. 4, 2024). In Regents, the court vacated-in-part a PTAB Final Written Decision invalidating a claim based on the thickness of a line in the prior-art patent figures and remanded for the PTAB to assess the art without reliance on the relative thickness of the bolded lines in the figure. Slip op. at 12.
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