CAFC Slaps Patent Office For Accommodating Serial Filer

In a precedential ruling, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit said that Alarm.com, which was denied three inter partes review petitions it filed against patents owned by Vivint, Inc., couldn’t effectively “repackage” the same arguments and challenge the same patents via ex parte reexamination. The opinion was authored by Chief Judge Moore. The CAFC called the USPTO’s grant of a reexamination request “arbitrary and capricious” and an abuse of discretion after it had denied the Inter Partes Review under 35 U.S.C. § 325(d). Its denial called one of the petitions “an example of undesirable, incremental petitioning.” The CAFC agreed that Alarm.com’s ex parte reexamination request raised substantial new questions, but that the Office still should have rejected it.