Prolific Inventor Loses Suit Against PTO Over Slow Examinations
Written September 2, 2020
The US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia on August 19, 2020, held that prolific inventor Gilbert P. Hyatt hadn’t shown that the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) deliberately chooses not to process, examine, or issue patents for his “extraordinarily lengthy” applications. Hyatt v. U.S. Patent & Trademark Office, E.D. Va., No. 1:18-cv-00546, 8/19/20.
Hyatt filed nearly 400 patent applications before June 1995 that are some of the longest-pending at the USPTO, the court said. The applications feature “some of the largest claim sets the PTO has ever encountered” with specifications that “run many hundreds of pages,” and Hyatt has amended them to add even more “significant complexity,” the agency told the court. The USPTO also said it formed a special 12-examiner unit dedicated to processing Hyatt’s applications.
The complexity of Hyatt’s applications was partly responsible for the office’s slow review, the court said in dismissing the case.