On January 27, 2020, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) denied five inter partes review (IPR) petitions filed by Microsoft, Inc. related to an Integrated Visual Augmentation System with a Rapid Target Acquisition (RTA) feature being developed for the U.S. government.
The PTAB found that the petitions were barred under 35 U.S.C. § 315(b), which denies IPR to a party, or a privy of the party, who is served a complaint involving infringement of such patents more than a year before the petition is filed. The U.S government and Microsoft reportedly entered into a contractual agreement for an augmentation system in 2018 while the government was defending a June 2017 dispute involving a patent with the same RTA feature.
