The Federal Circuit said the doctrine of prosecution laches renders a patent unenforceable if it was issued after an "unreasonable and unexplained delay in prosecution that constitutes an egregious misuse" of the patent system. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit - which he called a nearly identical case on the same issue - to find PMC's patent was unenforceable. In his decision last week, Gilstrap cited a June ruling by the U.S. PMC sued Apple in 2015, alleging its FairPlay technology developed in the early 2000s infringed the DRM patent. In this case, in 2012 PMC was issued "patent claims that it first sought in 2003 as part of a 1995 application based on a 1987 disclosure that itself was a continuation-in-part of a 1981 parent application," Gilstrap said. "Truthfully, I think most practitioners believed that submarine patents really didn't exist anymore," said Blair Jacobs, a patent litigator with McKool Smith. Submarine patents are already rare in 2021, and becoming rarer as 1995 recedes into the rearview. At that time, the PTO also didn't publish pending patent applications, and applicants could delay a patent from being issued until a market developed relating to the invention - when the "submarine" would emerge. The submarine strategy, involving protracted delays for maximal payoff, was mostly used before 1995, the year when the law changed to base the length of patent protection on when an application was filed instead of when the patent was issued. District Judge Rodney Gilstrap that torpedoed a rare "submarine" patent. (Reuters) - Apple won a reprieve last week from a $308 million jury award in East Texas federal court for allegedly infringing a digital rights management (DRM) patent owned by Personalized Media Communications, in a ruling by U.S.
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