Published in Landslide® magazine, Volume 10, Number 3 , a publication of the ABA Section of Intellectual Property Law (ABA-IPL), ©2018 by the American Bar Association. Reproduced with permission. All rights reserved.
This information or any portion thereof may not be copied or disseminated in any form or by any means or stored in an electronic database or retrieval system without the express written consent of the American Bar Association.
Navigating through
the Obviousness-Type
Double Patenting
Mineeld
By Amelia Feulner Baur
and ElizabethA. Doherty
Published in Landslide® magazine, Volume 10, Number 3, a publication of the ABA Section of Intellectual Property Law (ABA-IPL), ©2018 by the American Bar Association. Reproduced with permission. All rights reserved.
This information or any portion thereof may not be copied or disseminated in any form or by any means or stored in an electronic database or retrieval system without the express written consent of the American Bar Association.
Obviousness-type double patenting (ODP) is a judge-made doctrine intended
to prevent a patentee from unfairly extending its patent term by obtaining dif-
ferent patents for essentially the same invention.1 It also facilitates common
ownership of affected patents, which helps to “prevent multiple infringement suits
by different assignees asserting essentially the same patented invention.”2 ODP
occurs where a claim in a later patent is patentably indistinct from (i.e., is either
anticipated or rendered obvious by) a claim in an earlier patent.3
Image: iStockPhoto
