Patent Law

Tzero Technologies and the re-exam of US 6,970,448

By Lawrence B. Ebert, Esq.

While it was Pulse~LINK winning the last (but obviously not final) round of this multi-year tiff, the tables have turned once more. Tzero Technologies has just announced that the US Patent Office "issued an office action rejecting all claims of US patent number 6,970,448 asserted in a lawsuit brought by Pulse~LINK against Tzero in June 2007." This decision, coupled with a stay issued by the district court, will evidently bring the lawsuit to a close "for the foreseeable future." We're told that the legal struggles between the two are now officially over, but we're admittedly hesitant to believe it.

This looks like the first Office Action in a re-exam. For distinctions between the outcome of a first Office Action and final decision, ask PubPat and ConsumerWatchDog, who both crowed about a favorable first Office Action and went into "spin control mode" when the ultimate outcome was NOT favorable. WARF's three patents on stem cells survived. One can ask Eolas about the Director-ordered re-exam of the Eolas patent, which went no where, in spite of two negative Office Actions.

Full post as published by IPBiz on August 25, 2008 (boomark / email).