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Intellectual property news affecting business and everyday life.
Post Frequency: 6.6/day Last Entry: November 20, 2009 at 23:14:00 Recent Entries: 1975
By Lawrence B. Ebert, Esq.
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Journal Inquirer sues Courant over copying incident
Posted on November 20, 2009In an article titled Suit Accuses Hartford Courant of Plagiarism , the New York Times informs us that the "Journal Inquirer of Manchester, Conn., has sued The Courant" over copying news articles, but never quite tells us what the cause of action is. There is no cause of action for plagiarism, but there is one for copyright infringement...
TV questioning "high tech" forensics?
Posted on November 20, 2009On Monday, Nov. 16, CSI-Miami went through a number of "false positives" in forensics, including a "false positive" for blood alcohol caused by ethanol-producing micro-organisms elevating the ethanol level. [the details were not fleshed out, tho the investigators acted as if ethanol-producers were a known problem]On Tuesday, Nov...
Bilski: which elements from Eldred will return?
Posted on November 20, 2009Further to the IPBiz post titled On horse-training methods and Bilski oral argument , one recalls the exchange between Chief Justice Rehnquist and Professor Lessig in Eldred v. Ashcroft:MR. LESSIG: Well, if it flies in the face of what the Framers had in mind, then the question is, is there a way of interpreting their words that gives effect to what they had in mind, and the answer is yes...
J. M. Smucker makes P&G acquisitions work well
Posted on November 20, 2009J.M. Smucker, best known to patent attorneys for the so-called "peanut butter & jelly sandwich" patent, is doing very well with the acquisitions it has made from Procter & Gamble. A Reuters story on 20 Nov 09 begins: J.M. Smucker Co, best known for its peanut butter and jelly, posted higher-than-expected quarterly results, driven by strong margins at its Folgers coffee business, and raised its full-year profit outlook, sending its shares up 5 percent...
Taxpayers aren't venture capitalists, or zombies
Posted on November 19, 2009Comment to californiastemcellreport:In terms of orthodoxy, I had commented earlier that the academics reviewing CIRM proposals are predisposed to follow paths already charted in the literature and in the relationships known to them. Venture capitalists also follow rather orthodox game plans, although different ones from the academics...
Concerning citations, SSRN, oppositions and Graham
Posted on November 19, 2009In a comment to the IPBiz post Does the US need European style oppositions? , Stu Graham correctly points out that the full article by Graham and Harhoff can be downloaded at the link provided by the 271Blog. An issue with things posted on SSRN is that they can be later removed ("Sikahema'd"), for example, if the authors publish in a journal that prohibits internet posting (recall Dan Hunter's "Walled Gardens," although in that specific case the journal later changed its policy...
More on oppositions for the US patent system
Posted on November 19, 2009Mr. Graham posted a comment to the IPBiz post titled Concerning citations, SSRN, oppositions and Graham , which comment reads:Mr. Ebert is correct on several points here - the problem of SSRN downloads is one that vexes the free flow of scholarship, but it is often the case that once a piece is published, and restricted, a working paper can often be found in some depository, somewhere, by using Google Scholar...
Interesting IP issue at CIRM
Posted on November 18, 2009from the californiastemcellreport:Don Gibbons, chief communications officer for CIRM, said in an email,?After your inquiry, we contacted Square 1 to see if they would reconsider their request to treat the pricing information as confidential, in the interest of public disclosure...
Most cited law profs
Posted on November 18, 2009from the Madisonian in March 2009:1.) Posner, Richard A. cited 12,586 times in 251 articles.2.) Sunstein, Cass R. cited 11,521 times in 267 articles.3.) Epstein, Richard A. cited 6,194 times in 272 articles.4.) Easterbrook, Frank H. cited 6,018 times in 84 articlesAll of whom were at the University of Chicago when LBE was there...
On horse-training methods and Bilski oral argument
Posted on November 18, 2009In the post My favorite quote from the Bilski v Kappos SCOTUS oral arguments, the Invent Blog mentions the horse-training patent inquiry of Justice Scalia, which included text:JUSTICE SCALIA: You know, you mention that there are all these -- these new areas that didn't exist in the past because of modern business and what-not, but there are also areas that existed in the past that don't exist today...
Dudas whacked by PatentHawk, but what about Lemley?
Posted on November 17, 2009In a post titled Heritage of the Heretic, Gary Odom [Patent Prospector / PatentHawk] goes after former-USPTO Director Jon Dudas:In the ultimate backfire, political hack Jon Dudas has left his mark on the patent office. Dudas demeaned the PTO by being openly hostile to its bread-and-butter clientele, patent applicants, with proposed rules that would limit claims and even applications, in a banal attempt to address pendency...
Obviousness - type double patenting
Posted on November 17, 2009Of a comment on 17 Nov 09 to the post Double-patenting "does in" Boehringer's Mirapex [27 June 08], obviousness-type double-patenting is a judicially-created doctrine to keep a patentee from getting additional patent lifetime out of an "obvious" variation of something already patented...
SIU's unintentional plagiarism concept as contrived sophistry?
Posted on November 17, 2009IPBiz reproduces the following comment from c-ville news & arts, for the purpose of noting that it was not written by LBE (although it evokes many themes seen on IPBiz):Adopting the recently contrived sophistry of ?unintentional plagiarism? will absolve University of Virginia students of their responsibility to know what plagiarism is and to not do it...
Microsoft's US 7,617,530
Posted on November 17, 2009Claim 1 says:One or more computer-readable media having computer-readable instructions therein that, when executed by a computing device, cause the computing device to present a user interface in response to a task being prohibited based on a user's current account not having a right to permit the task, the user interface comprising: information indicating the task and an entity that attempted the task; a selectable help graphic wherein responsive to receiving selection of the selectable help graphic, the computer-readable instructions further cause the computing device to present the information; identifiers, each of the identifiers identifying other accounts having a right to permit the task, wherein the identifiers presented are based on criteria comprising: frequency of use; association with the user; and indication of sufficient but not unlimited rights; one of the identifiers identifies a higher-rights account having a right to permit the task, wherein the one of the identifiers comprises: a graphic identifying the higher-rights accounts associated with the user; and a name of the higher-rights account; an authenticator region capable of receiving, from the user, an authenticator usable to authenticate the higher-rights account having the right to permit the task, wherein: the authenticator comprises a password, and the authenticator region comprises a data-entry field configured to receive the password...
Was the 97% grant rate an outrageous inaccuracy or a ludicrous mistake?
Posted on November 17, 2009Congr. David Obey, when talking of outrageous inaccuracies and ludicrous mistakes, was referring to what's on recovery.gov, but perhaps might have been talking about the urban legend of the 97% patent grant rate.Lest we forget, the grant rate number made its way in a brief to the US Supreme Court in the eBay case.
Of jellyfish, Schatten, and SCNT
Posted on November 16, 2009Recent internet chatter about the invasion by giant Nomura jellyfish evokes memories of Gerald Schatten, the one-time collaborator of stem cell fraudster Hwang Woo Suk, whose [Schatten's] earlier claim to fame had been creation of the first monkey to contain DNA from another animal ? in this case a jellyfish...
"Science is not done by consensus"
Posted on November 16, 2009Arvid Pasto on global warming issues:Science is not done by consensus, and unless and until there is conclusive scientific evidence to support man-made global warming, we should not risk the economic viability of the U.S.
Patenting a sports strategy?
Posted on November 16, 2009Now that the issue of patenting a sports move is back, perhaps someone will advocate patenting a sports strategy.The failure of the New York Giants to hold the San Diego Chargers seems to have "inspired" the Jacksonville Jaguars:Instead of running into the end zone for a 10-yard TD run on first down with 1:48 left in the game, Jones-Drew alertly fell at the 1-yard line to keep the clock moving...
Ghost-writing (plagiarism) in the biosimilar business?
Posted on November 16, 2009In a NYT article titled In House, Many Spoke With One Voice: Lobbyists?, Robert Pear discusses how numerous Congressman had remarks which were written by a lobbyist "written in" to the Congressional Record. Both Democrats and Republicans, who had opposing positions on the bill at issue (on biosimilars), copied text from the lobbyist...
On not practicing patents
Posted on November 15, 2009Recall Patent Nonuse and the Role of Public Interest as a Deterrent to Technology Suppression [Kurt M. Saunders, 15 Harv. J. Law & Tec 389 ] which begins with text from Jack Kerouac's novel, On the Road, about technology suppression. But compare to "The Graduate...
BPAI Sikahemas NTP re-exam decisions
Posted on November 15, 2009From 1201Tuesday on the re-exam decisions on NTP patents:If you're looking to do your own analysis, however, you'll have to jump through some hoops. That's because those decisions are no longer available on the BPAI site. Tuesday night: there, Thursday night: no trace...
A photon is not a photon!
Posted on November 14, 2009From Bob Park:Photons induce cancer by the photoelectric effect, breaking chemical bonds and creating mutant strands of DNA. In 2001, I was invited to write an editorial on cell phone hazards for the Journal of the National Cancer Institute (JNCI, Vol...
Lehman on patent reform and slack-jawed lawyers
Posted on November 14, 2009Bruce Lehman, who as Commissioner of Patents & Trademarks (aka Director) opposed the creation of a publicly-available patent database, weighed in on patent reform in commenting on the case Centocor v. Abbott: So, in the Centocor case, some 18 years of scientific discovery and complex damage calculations came before the court in fewer than four days of testimony...
"They're back!": patenting sports moves
Posted on November 14, 2009Just when you thought law reviews were getting safe, the Santa Clara Computer & High Tech. Law Journal published : IT'S YOUR TURN, BUT IT'S MY MOVE: INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY PROTECTION FOR SPORTS "MOVES" [25 Santa Clara Computer & High Tech. L.J. 765 ]The beginning "bio" reveals the "back to the 90's" flavor: At the time this article was written, F...
NSF grant proposal plagiarized?
Posted on November 13, 2009Jake Bolitho noted that a committee organized by Interim Provost Gary Shapiro [of CMU] found uncited information from three different sources in a grant proposal for a project titled ?CONCEPT: Connecting Concept and Pedagogical Education of Pre-service Teachers?...
"Hitler" attacks the anti-IP academic elite
Posted on November 12, 2009Although the YouTube video is titled Hilter is Furious at the Supreme Court for Granting Cert to Bilski, one of the major targets of this satire is the academic "patent law" community who have worked to undermine patent rights over the last few years...
Academic plagiarism addressed in "Dear Abby" style
Posted on November 12, 2009An inquiry to Lily Garcia (published at the Washington Post) begins:I have a good friend who is a tenured faculty member at a state university. A junior faculty member in their department gave a presentation at a national conference that was plagiarized...
The saga of the $5 footlong: lessons for IP people?
Posted on November 11, 2009In a BusinessWeek article titled The Accidental Hero , carrying the sub-headline --Subway's $5 footlong, the brainchild of an obscure Miami franchisee, is the fast-food success story of the recession --, Matthew Boyle writes Nobody, least of all [obscure Miami franchisee Stuart] Frankel, knew it at the time, but he had stumbled on a concept that has unexpectedly morphed from a short-term gimmick into a national phenomenon that has turbocharged Subway's performance...
Justice Sotomayor in Bilski
Posted on November 10, 2009An interchange in Bilski oral arguments:MR. JAKES: That?s right. But they have also defined ?technology? in such a way as to exclude business methods. And I don?t think we can do that.The fields of operations research, industrial engineering, even financial engineering, there has been an explosion in these particular fields, and to now call them non-technological because they didn?t exist over 100 years ago wouldn?t make -JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: Are you suggesting they didn?t exist because we didn?t give them patents 100 years ago?MR...
Robots.txt, again
Posted on November 10, 2009At news.sky:[Rupert Murdoch] cited the Wall Street Journal as an example of where only the first paragraph comes up on search engines and is free. Anything after that is subscription-based.He is planning to make newspapers like The Times and Sunday Times chargeable online...
Plagiarism is plagiarism!
Posted on November 10, 2009An editorial at the Virginia Cavalier titled Borrowing ideas contains the text:Briceland specifically drew a distinction between grammatical plagiarism and honor plagiarism. Grammatical plagiarism arises when sources are not given appropriate credit in a student?s work either because of unintentional errors in citation or from ignorance of the proper method of attribution...
"Director's Forum: David Kappos' Public Blog"
Posted on November 10, 2009In his entry of November 10, 2009, Director Kappos writes:The legislation [patent reform] is the product of a series of compromises in the eyes of virtually every segment of the IP community. But it is also a vast improvement over what we have now ? and there is a strong consensus that the status quo is simply unsustainable...
"The best of times and the worst of times": US Ethernet and Apple
Posted on November 09, 2009In October 09, there was some buzz about US Ethernet suing Apple and others over patents US Ethernet obtained from 3Com.From AppleInsider on 19 Oct.: the lawsuit from U.S. Ethernet Innovations targets Apple's MacBook Pro, along with hardware from a number of other manufacturers...
Plagiarism, sock-puppeting and the Dead Sea Scrolls
Posted on November 09, 2009The Gothamist writes:Posting online comments under multiple aliases is apparently against the law, at least in the case of Raphael Haim Golb, 49, who is suspected of using 50 different e-mail addresses and monikers ? some of the names belonging to academic rivals ? to bolster his arguments about the origins of the Dead Sea Scrolls...
Cartoons for blogs?
Posted on November 08, 2009Note the site intelsinsides.Unlike with patent troll tracker, at least one knows who is running it.***Separately, "60 Minutes" on Nov. 8 discussed possible issues with computer hackers (from China?) disrupting the power grid. Remind anyone of a movie? [Live Free or Die Hard (2007) ]Separately, in Somerset County on 8 Nov 09, from www...
Taking a ride in a Tesla Roadster
Posted on November 08, 2009The 5 Nov 09 issue of "The Somerset Reporter" had an article titled 'GrEEn Day 2009' in Warren wll recieved [sic] which mentioned that, for a nominal fee, visitors could take a ride in Tesla Roadster.The article also mentioned that Tesla was loaned $460 million by the government...
The "wearing down" fallacy as to examiners and editors
Posted on November 08, 2009Way back in 2004, Mark A. Lemley and Kimberly A. Moore in their "Ending Abuse..." paper [ 84 BULR 64 (2004) ] wrote at page 65:the structure of the PTO suggests that continuations may well succeed in "wearing down" the examiner, so that the applicant obtains a broad patent not because he deserves one, but because the examiner has neither incentive nor will to hold out any longer...
Does the US need European style oppositions?
Posted on November 08, 2009In a post titled Study Concludes U.S. Would Benefit From EPO-Style Opposition , the 271Blog quotes from the Graham/Harhoff study pushing PGR:This market power either allows the patentee to extort licensing fees, or force competitors to invent around the respective patent...
Mendte snagged by copyright law?
Posted on November 07, 2009Larry Mendte is apparently pushing a show Coming Clean to TV news execs, wherein news stories beneath headlines would be analyzed, with a removal of bias and spin. His treatment on YouTube got pulled because CBS objected to the inclusion of (copyrighted) footage of Mendte's anchor work on Philly's KYW-3...
"And outsourcing can often deliver real innovation, especially in economic development "
Posted on November 07, 2009The title quote [And outsourcing can often deliver real innovation, especially in economic development. ] appears in the New York Times.In that outsourcing does change the way we live, it can be considered an innovation, but whether it "delivers" innovation is another matter...
Derivative priority and the Thomas/Matisse/Obama matter
Posted on November 07, 2009Ben Shapiro, in a post titled ?Washington Post? Endorses Plagiarism to Defend Obama delves into the Thomas/Watusi/Matisse/Snail matter and the Shepard Fairey Obama Hope/AP matter.In the first paragraph, the manifest beef seems to be that the Washington Post didn't credit Shapiro with being the first to identify the Thomas/Matisse story: ignoring the fact that Big Hollywood actually broke the story...
On waiving attorney-client privilege to protect oneself
Posted on November 07, 2009In a 2005 post [ Overzealous patent attorneys lead to client disenchantment ], IPBiz made reference to Parker B. Potter, Jr., Ordeal by Trial: Judicial References to the Nightmare World of Franz Kafka, 3 Pierce L. Rev. 195 (2005)["Since the mid 1970s, however, Kafka's name has appeared in more than 400 opinions written by American state and federal judges...
Subject matter jurisdiction: KCI and Innovative
Posted on November 07, 2009In January 2008, IPBiz posted on a patent infringement suit by KCI against Innovative, launched in MD NC.[KCI goes after Innovative Therapies over vacuum bandage ]On 14 July 2008, Magistrate Judge Leonard P. Stark in D. Del. recommended a dismissal of a DJ action brought by Innovative against KCI, initially filed 25 Sept...
Of patent twits, Switzerland, and the Netherlands
Posted on November 05, 2009In the context of naming Gene Quinn as "patent twit of the week", some of the folks at the "Center for a Stateless Society" brought up the once-patentless countries of the Netherlands and Switzerland:Koepsell had mentioned ?that in the 19th and early 20th centuries, two of the most innovative countries on earth (The Netherlands and Switzerland) had no patent systems at all?...
Law prof sues blogger
Posted on November 05, 2009In a post titled Law Professor Sues Over 'Above the Law' Blog Posts , Eric Goldman discusses the case Jones v. Minkin, 1:09-cv-23256-MGC (SD Fla).Within the post is the sentence: Unfortunately for Above the Law, Florida does not have a robust anti-SLAPP statute...
Mitsubishi settles with Rothschild
Posted on November 05, 2009Reuters reports that Professor Gertrude Neumark Rothschild and Mitsubishi have settled:Mitsubishi is the latest company to reach a global settlement with Rothschild, aprofessor emeritus at Columbia University. Others who have settled include BenQ,Dalien Lumei, Epistar Corp...
High paying jobs going unfilled in the recession?
Posted on November 05, 2009In a story titled Despite millions of job seekers, many positions sit open, Jessica Dickler wrote that more than half of employers responded in a recent survey that "quality of candidates" or "availability of candidates" are their greatest challenges...
More legal plagiarism exposed, but thesis committee blamed
Posted on November 05, 2009At one point, Alan Dershowitz famously suggested that law schools promote a culture of copying. In Budapest, one Ludek Hosman has apparently taken the Dershowitz suggestion to the max. From the Budapest Times:Hosman?s 7-year-old thesis is identical to the thesis of his former supervisor Radovan Sládek, who was head of the Plzen police before Hosman was appointed in 1998...
More on Mashelkar
Posted on November 05, 2009Further to controversy on the Mashelkar report on pharma patenting, C.H. Unnikrishnan recently reported:Almost six months after the second report was submitted, Argentinian intellectual property law expert Carlos M. Correa claimed that its conclusion was based on his report, prepared in 2000 in a different context...
KSR: the need to tell an extremely cool story
Posted on November 03, 2009Back in June 2007, IPBiz noted that a response of patent practitioners to KSR v. Teleflex concerned the need to tell a good story of invention to the USPTO [the viewpoint of "KSR v. Teleflex is about telling an extremely cool story," as expressed on June 10, 2007 at "Spring Seminar 2007" (LAIPLA/SDIPLA)...
Ruling in Myriad/BRCA case: can anyone challenge any patent at any time?
Posted on November 03, 2009In July, IPBiz noted text within one defendant's brief in the case brought by the ACLU and others against Myriad and the USPTO:"If the plaintiffs in this case have standing, then virtually anyone can challenge any patent at any time."Just last week, on 26 Oct 09, LBE heard one of the defendants' attorneys assert they were going to win on the standing issue...
Remembering "Bullet Bob" Turley
Posted on November 03, 2009Gordon Edes, in his article titled Burnett is a short-timer in Game 5 loss, mysteriously fails to mention Bob Turley's outing in game 2 of the 1958 World Series: responsible for 4 runs in 1/3 of an inning in what would be a seven run first inning for the Braves...
Mood rings and pet rocks as inventions
Posted on November 03, 2009Tony ["Tony D. DiNozzo" played by Michael Weatherly] on 3 November 09 in NCIS expounded on well-known inventions, including mood rings, pet rocks, and sporks, to which the response was that they were terrible inventions, to which in turn Tony responded that they made their inventors wealthy ('drillionaires")...
NJ newspaper endorses "not best" candidate
Posted on November 01, 2009philly.com wrote on 1 Nov 09:In an editorial published Sunday [1 Nov 09], the newspaper said Independent Chris Daggett has run an admirable and credible campaign and is the strongest candidate in Tuesday's election. But it also feels he cannot win the race, citing recent polls...
The New York Times on sharing technology
Posted on November 01, 2009From Everybody in the Pool of Green Innovation:For instance, Nike?s air-bag patent for cushioning shoes is crucial to its core shoe business, but may have environmental benefits in other industries ? perhaps in prolonging the useful life of tires. Green Xchange could enable Nike to license the air-bag technology selectively to noncompeting companies...
Los Angeles Times on the Fairey "Obama Hope" matter
Posted on November 01, 2009An editorial at the Los Angeles Times states of the consitutional provision on copyright/patent in the context of the Fairey matterThe framers of the Constitution were so concerned about that incentive that they gave Congress the power to grant inventors and authors exclusive rights over their works in order to "promote the progress of science and the useful arts...
The "golden rule" at the University of Central Florida
Posted on October 31, 2009The Golden Rule at UCF: ?Academic misconduct includes but is not limited to cheating, plagiarism, assisting another in cheating or plagiarism, and commercial use of academic materials.?ANDUCF is a member of the Center for Academic Integrity [CAI] along with many other schools, such as Kansas State University, where students are required to write the school?s Honor Pledge on every exam and assignment, according to the CAI?s Web site...
Amgen sued by 15 states in Aranesp overfill billing matter
Posted on October 31, 2009The LATimes reports that Amgen was sued in D. Mass, on 30 Oct. 09 by 15 states who accused Amgen sales representatives of encouraging doctors and other healthcare providers to bill insurers for the drug Aranesp that the practitioners received free from Amgen...
Patent Reform: selling tomatoes as cantaloupes from a carrot box?
Posted on October 30, 2009The "selling" of patent reform is much like the above selling of tomatoes as cantaloupes from a carrot box.Current wisdom suggests the Senate patent reform package will fly in 2009, including a "one window" post-grant review (PGR, opposition) package arising from the perceived need for a mechanism to address the perceived "patent quality" problem...
Bloggers criticized in Bilski session
Posted on October 28, 2009In a session titled "Behind the Scenes Look at Bilski", speakers criticized (obliquely) certain blogger commentary on the Bilski case.Two observations:#1. The speakers had prepared more thorough commentary on Bilski than is seen within most blogs.#2...
Crichton as authority on 35 USC 101?
Posted on October 27, 2009IPBiz heard a story that a Congressional staffer relied on comments from Michael Crichton in evaluating patentability in the area of genes.See alsoOn Crichton
Baby Einstein: guilty of misleading the American public?
Posted on October 27, 2009In a post titled The great Baby Einstein scam , Mira Shine noted:The New York Times reported Thursday that Disney is offering a refund to buyers of its ubiquitous ?Baby Einstein? videos, which did not, as promised, turn babies into wunderkinds. Apparently, all those puppets, bright colors, and songs were what we had feared all along?a mind-numbing way to occupy infants...
MaxDrei comments at IPBiz on post-grant review
Posted on October 27, 2009In a first for IPBiz, MaxDrei has posted a comment, related to post-grant review [see Kappos on the USPTO: "the nose of this airplane is pointed down" :Dreaming is what it is, but one can see how post-issue validity proceedings could be the solution...
Hwang Woo Suk convicted of embezzlement
Posted on October 26, 2009Timesonline noted: The judges found yesterday that Hwang had misappropriated 830 million won (£430,000) of research funds but ruled that it had not been for his personal enrichment. He was acquitted of fraudulently obtaining private donations worth two billion won.
PatentBaristas at BIO IPCounsels Conference
Posted on October 26, 2009The PatentBaristas blog is represented at the BIO IPCounsel's Conference in Washington DC on 26 Oct 09.
Kappos on the USPTO: "the nose of this airplane is pointed down"
Posted on October 25, 2009At the Association of Corporate Counsel's annual meeting, David Kappos did NOT exude near-term confidence for the USPTO. As quoted in the National Law Journal: "the nose of this airplane is pointed down" (...)"Under the current environment, we're not going to make significant progress...
Myron Rolle at Oxford
Posted on October 25, 2009In a post in 2008, IPBiz talked about Myron Rolle, a collegiate football player (FSU) out of the Princeton area. A piece in the Guardian titled US football star Myron Rolle trades touchdowns for test tubes at Oxford gives an update:Rolle, 22, was a star defensive player at Florida State University, where he also won acclaim as a pre-medical student for research on stem cells and cancer cells...
HP out of "Coalition for Patent Fairness"?
Posted on October 25, 2009Andrew Noyes reports: Computer giant Hewlett-Packard has pulled out of the Coalition for Patent Fairness over concerns that legislation currently moving through Congress does not go far enough to curb what some high-tech firms believe are excessive damages in patent infringement lawsuits...
Mike/Techdirt blowing smoke in Fairey/AP matter?
Posted on October 25, 2009Mike at Techdirt took a whack at AP reporting in the Fairey/AP case, because Fairey's lawyers may not yet have withdrawn:But, if we're going to talk credibility, shouldn't the Associated Press be careful to actually fact check its own articles on a case involving itself? In announcing the news about the Fairey revelation, the AP claimed that Fairey's lawyers had withdrawn from the case...
Website grouping patent attorneys
Posted on October 24, 2009In an interesting website of patent attorneys, LBE appears just below Chester Carlson, quite an honor. Greg "Fossilman" Raymer, of poker fame, is there too, as is C. Yardley Chittick (born October 22, 1900).See also:http://ipbiz.blogspot.com/2009/08/chester-carlson-inventor-did-know-best...
Only in New Jersey?
Posted on October 24, 2009In responding to a questionnaire from the Vernon (New Jersey) Taxpayers Association sent to candidates for the Vernon Town Council, candidate Harry Shortway apparently copied some of his answers from other sources.The Advertiser-News reported:[Shortway] said that his time was tight and while researching the topics brought up in the questionnaire, he did in fact use information from other sources but not in an effort to present it as his own words...
Nokia goes after Apple's iPhone
Posted on October 24, 2009Nokia has filed a patent infringement suit in D. Delaware against Apple for infringement of claims of patents relating to G.S.M. and U.M.T.S.,With the iPhone cutting into Nokia's business, the NYT quoted Mr. Mawston of Strategy Analytics: ?Where there is a hit, there is usually a writ...
"He hired a team of lawyers to punish me for voicing my opinions"
Posted on October 24, 2009IPBiz has been discussing the matter involving K.Y. Cha and Bruce Flamm. See for example:Flamm prevails over Cha on November 20, 2007Cha's suit against Flamm is backK.Y. Cha's suit against Flamm tossed by Superior Court (again!)K. Y. Cha was a co-author of an article published in the Journal of Reproductive Medicine claiming that prayers from the United States,Canada, and Australia caused a 100% increase in pregnancy rates amonginfertility patients in Korea...
The balance between 35 USC 122(c) and 37 CFR 1.99
Posted on October 23, 2009Further to a discussion of 35 USC 122 [Not Schrodinger's cat ], one notes that the mandate of 122(c), which states:(c) PROTEST AND PRE-ISSUANCE OPPOSITION.- The Director shall establish appropriate procedures to ensure that no protest or other form of pre-issuance opposition to the grant of a patent on an application may be initiated after publication of the application without the express written consent of the applicant...
A plagiarism "top ten" list
Posted on October 22, 2009Amber Johnson emailed a link to her Top 10 Plagiarism Scandals of All Time . Only one of her "top ten" has appeared on IPBiz, that relating to Harvard student Kaavya Viswanathan .Obama is on the list, but IPBiz selects Joe Biden head over heels before Obama...
"Twittering taco trucks," or was that patent reform?
Posted on October 22, 2009CBS Evening News with Katie Couric on Oct. 22 had a piece on the NJ governor's race. The photo angles were particularly flattering to challenger Christie. [So far nothing on the CBS webpage.] CBS News mentioned that Corzine was spending a lot of his own money in the race (more than 2X of Christie's outlay)...
Not Schrodinger's cat
Posted on October 22, 2009In a post titled Be All You Can't Be: Army Patent Ambushed by Friendly Fire, Aaron R. Feigelson describes a patent that "ran out of time" before it issued. Aaron's point is that the patent was DEAD on arrival. A different blog refers to this as relating to Schrodinger's cat, a thought experiment wherein the cat was both dead and alive...
Earlier press hype over Ida the missing link now being undercut
Posted on October 22, 2009Malcolm Ritter of AP writes:Remember Ida, the fossil discovery announced last May with its own book and TV documentary? A publicity blitz called it "the link" that would reveal the earliest evolutionary roots of monkeys, apes and humans. Experts protested that Ida wasn't even a close relative...
Alan Kasper named Prez of AIPLA
Posted on October 22, 2009The BLT Blog reported:Alan Kasper, a senior partner and patent lawyer at Washington-based Sughrue Mion, has been named president of the American Intellectual Property Law Association, the firm announced Monday.
Nocera reverses position on plagiarism charge
Posted on October 22, 2009In a post titled Clearing a Name at Lehman, Joe Nocera reversed himself on a charge of plagiarism against a person then at Lehman:When he first became aware of the post, seven months after the fact, he called me to complain. He made a convincing case that he had never plagiarized other analysts, and that he had not, in fact, been fired...
CSI Miami episode "Bad Seed" portrays an evil patentee
Posted on October 20, 2009The episode of CSI Miami titled "Bad Seed" (Season 8 Episode 5) has a patent holder on a recombinant corn seed who enforces the patent against a neighboring farmer. Said farmer can't afford a lawyer and has to sell some of his land to settle the patent infringement case...
Management 101 at the USPTO?
Posted on October 20, 2009On 1 October 2009, Ed O'Keefe reported in the Washington Post:In a move designed to improve employee morale and to help reduce a growing backlog, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office proposed changes Wednesday [Sept. 30] to its way of determining how long a patent examiner has to complete a patent examination and the incentives that examiners earn...
New York Times caught copying
Posted on October 20, 2009An article in the Guardian begins:Phil Bronstein, executive vice president and editor-at-large of the San Francisco Chronicle, has exposed the New York Times for "borrowing" a Chronicle story.Bronstein also noted: To be fair, a reasonable amount of what was in the Times story was different than the Chronicle's...
"The bigger the backlog, the messier the tangle"??
Posted on October 20, 2009From Timothy Prickett Morgan at ITJungle:According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is going to scrap rules that the Bush Administration put in place to limit the flood of patents that companies could file. The idea was that fewer patents would speed up the approval and denial process at USPTO...
Contracting around trade secret law?
Posted on October 19, 2009Neil Wilkof at IPFinance asks whether one can contract around trade secrets law and writes:Put briefly, at some time during the treatment of trade secrets there is always at least one thoughtful, attentive student who asks the ultimate question--"So why do we need trade secret protection as a separate and distinct right? Surely it can be subsumed into other rights--such as contract and tort--that handle the subject matter...
"60 Minutes" on Kanzius: We don?t want to be in a position to hype this.
Posted on October 18, 2009"60 Minutes" did a followup on John Kanzius and his anti-cancer rf machine on 18 Oct. 09.Sadly, Kanzius had died in February 2009, and the portion of the show illustrating that he had self-treated with rf, without using the nanoparticles, was sadder still...
Examining the examiners of patent examination
Posted on October 18, 2009Peter Zura at the 271Blog has kept us up to date on articles by Mark Lemley. In a recent post, Zura notes the article Examining Patent Examination and highlights the conclusion:The evidence illuminates the patent prosecution process as a continuing negotiation between examiner and applicant...
"60 Minutes" to discuss Kanzius again
Posted on October 17, 2009GoErie notes that there will be a further discussion of John Kanzius on "60 Minutes":Its crews and reporter Lesley Stahl conducted subsequent interviews with Kanzius before his death and also talked with others involved in the project, including Steven Curley, M...
"Foley's culture of bad conduct"?
Posted on October 17, 2009Joe Mullin quotes from an email of Erich Spangenberg, arising in the context of Foley & Lardner naming him as a third-party defendant in a dispute between patent-holding company DataTern and its former lawyers at Foley & Lardner: "IPNav will be required to recount numerous instances?all supported by references?of Foley's culture of bad conduct, poor judgment, and nonchalance regarding professionalism, which contradict Foley's vastly overrated claims of superiority and excellent client service...
"I think lawyering is really very simple: It's word of mouth."
Posted on October 17, 2009Cooley lawyer Michael Rhodes: "I think lawyering is really very simple: It's word of mouth."The Recorder article also mentions the Maldives, and a quote about some departing lawyers: "there's no there there"When Gertrude Stein wanted to visit her childhood home in Oakland, she could not find the house, and wrote :What was the use of me having come from Oakland, it was not natural for me to have come from there yes write about it if I like or anything if I like but not there, there is no there there...
Craziness has a fine history in physics?
Posted on October 17, 2009In an essay titled "The Collider, the Particle and a Theory About Fate," DENNIS OVERBYE writes:But craziness has a fine history in a physics that talks routinely about cats being dead and alive at the same time and about anti-gravity puffing out the universe...
Twitter: tweet today, gone tomorrow?
Posted on October 17, 2009californiastemcellreport noted on 13 Oct 09:When we Googled the terms ?klein research america,? a reference to the award from ?Research America? came up in the No. 5 position. But it linked to an item from Twitter (known as a Tweet) ? not the announcements from Research America or CIRM...
Fairey admits misrepresentation in Obama Hope poster matter
Posted on October 17, 2009On 12 Feb 09, IPBiz noted:Mark Lemley's new law firm, Durie Tangri Lemley Roberts & Kent, has wasted no time in taking a whack at Associated Press (AP), in filing a declaratory judgment action in the Shepard Fairey matter involving the Obama Hope poster...
Senate Judiciary Committee votes against "reverse payments" in drug deals
Posted on October 16, 2009Reuters reported that on 15 Oct. 09 the Senate Judiciary Committee voted 12-7 to forbid "reverse payments" (aka pay for delay) in deals between generic drug companies and proprietary drug companies.See also On Hatch-Waxman settlements
Ranbaxy wins against Roche in DNJ on valganciclovir
Posted on October 16, 2009Daiichi-Ranbaxy prevailed against Roche Palo Alto (formerly Syntex) in the District Court of New Jersey by securing a finding of noninfringement of the claims of US 6,083,953 directed to crystalline valganciclovir. Roche had argued that the amorphous valganciclovir of Ranbaxy would convert to crystalline valganciclovir...
Twist in Australian plagiarism case
Posted on October 16, 2009The Australian reports that the Queensland Crime and Misconduct Commission [CMC] has launched an official inquiry into the accusations of plagiarism in three articles in the Queensland Law Society's [QLS} Proctor magazine. The Australian notes the presence of state involvement: The CMC has become involved in the affair because the QLS is a state government statutory body and, as a unit of public administration, is subject to the CMC...
Pablum from the PTO?
Posted on October 15, 2009Patent Docs reported on a meeting in Chicago involving Cameron Kerry and Sharon Barner. The Patent Docs discussion evoked a "meet the new boss, same as the old boss" theme, with comments like:However, he also said that the PTO administration needed something more in order to solve the problems the Patent Office is facing...
Stanford/Roche case NOT a win for academic inventors
Posted on October 15, 2009A recenr release from Reuters on the Stanford/Roche case was titled:Federal Circuit Court Hands Academic Inventors a Big Win - IP Advocate Founder Says Decision Affirms That Faculty Inventors, Not Universities, Own Their InventionsThe result of the case was that the invention by the Stanford person was owned by Cetus, then by Roche...
CU going after Ward Churchill?
Posted on October 14, 2009The AP reported:The University of Colorado is seeking to recover funds it spent fighting a wrongful termination lawsuit filed by a professor who was fired on plagiarism charges after he likened some Sept. 11 terrorist attack victims to a Nazi leader.CU filed its bill for more than $52,000 in court last week...
NBC "10 pm" and IBM "wall of patents": similar strategies?
Posted on October 14, 2009There has been much discussion of NBC placing Jay Leno in the 10pm time slot. The NYT observed that Leno was pulling a 1.5 to 2 rating in the category NBC identifies as all-important, viewers ages 18 to 49 and further stated:Though most 10 p.m. shows with those kinds of numbers get canceled, NBC has said from the beginning that it could accept much lower ratings because of the enormous cost savings of Mr...
Authorship of "This is it"
Posted on October 13, 2009"This is it", billed as Michael Jackson's new song, is a song that Jackson had written with Paul Anka around the time of Thriller [ca. 1983] and which had previously been released as "I Never Heard." [Safire, 1991].Everyone is on the same page now, so no big litigations are in the offing...
Air New Zealand criticizes IBM
Posted on October 13, 2009The National Business Review wrote of the IBM failure:A failed oil pressure sensor on a backup generator could be the reason Air New Zealand?s computer system crashed on Sunday [11 Oct 09] for six hours, IBM confirmed this morning.The IT failure caused disruptions to more than 10,000 Air New Zealand customers, who were delayed by two hours on average...
The refrigerator patent wars heat up
Posted on October 12, 2009The Joongangdaily quoted LG on the re-hearing by the ITC of the case brought by Whirlpool:?The commission?s order for another look at this suit was an extremely rare case in the history of ITC judging, and some speculated that it was affected by Whirlpool?s aggressiveness and the spreading of a protectionist stance in the U...
WARF, Intel settle Core 2 case
Posted on October 12, 2009WARF and Intel settled the Core 2 case on 10 Oct 09. See previous IPBiz post More on WARF going after Intel . The patent in suit was US 5,781,752, firstnamed inventor Andreas I. Moshovos; Gurindar Sohi is a named inventor.An interesting aspect is that support for this work came from both the US government and from Intel (see below)...
Cloud-based service failure with Microsoft/T-Mobile/Sidekick
Posted on October 12, 2009T=Mobile on 10 Oct 09:"We must now inform you that personal information stored on your device - such as contacts, calendar entries, to-do lists or photos - that is no longer on your Sidekick almost certainly has been lost as a result of a server failure at Microsoft/Danger...
Oct. 11 "Cold Case" a knock-off of Law & Order SVU
Posted on October 12, 2009The 11 Oct. 09 episode of "Cold Case" featured a plot line wherein a judge [ Judge Harold ?Harry? Alvarez played by Miguel Perez ] was channeling juvenile offenders to a facility [Havenhurst] in which his sister-in-law had a financial interest. [There was even a play on the word "jurisprudence," which is also the title of the episode...
The value of in-house IP counsel experience
Posted on October 11, 2009From a press release at Reuters:"We believe that attorneys with experience as in-house IP counsel possess amuch better ability to translate business goals into IP strategy," continuedMr. Jonathan Levitt. "Patent GC attorneys are all lawyers who have had to managebudgets, make strategic decisions about patent portfolios and work withtechnology development teams as well as the business teams and investors atfast-paced operating companies...
Corporate loyalty and the Cable/Hanson story
Posted on October 11, 2009Underlying the story of the (alleged) assault by Raider's coach Tom Cable upon Randy Hanson is the personal dynamic.Sports.yahoo suggested a tension because Hanson had been hired by Davis, not by Cable.Though it has been suggested that Hanson was a snitch for Davis who reported to the owner about the behavior of his fellow coaches, he adamantly denied that depiction...
Patents run amok?
Posted on October 11, 2009Rob Preston of InformationWeek writes :The system wasn't conceived to enrich inventors. It was set up to encourage innovation, and stimulate the job creation and broader economic and societal value derived from innovation. Letting companies assemble a portfolio of other people's patents for the express purpose of suing alleged violators hardly serves that interest...
Rhode Island patent jury ?lacked a grasp of the issues before it"; Microsoft gets win in Uniloc case
Posted on September 30, 2009Bloomberg notes that U.S. District Judge William Smith in Providence, Rhode Island, on Sept. 29 vacated an April 2009 jury verdict of patent infringement of a Uniloc patent by Microsoft.In his order, Judge Smith wrote that the jury ?lacked a grasp of the issues before it and reached a finding without a legally sufficient basis...
The journal "Engineering with Computers" publishes plagiarized article, retracts
Posted on September 30, 2009IPBiz has covered plagiarized texts which have appeared in science journals (eg, British science paper on "sperm from stem cells" retracted! ). There's another one out, this time involving plagiarism by Kamran Daneshjou, Iran's science minister, wherein the journal "Engineering withComputers" published in 2009 a paper copied from a 2002 published article...
New Jersey's patent bank website
Posted on September 29, 2009On 25 Sept 09, a collaboration among New Jersey's Office of Information Technology, the Commission on Higher Education, the Commission on Science & Technology and the Governor?s Office of Economic Growth launched a website on patents, New Jersey Patent Bank [www...
Should bloggers be Teflon-coated?
Posted on September 29, 2009In a post titled Don?t Like a Blog, Sue It on the ipeg blog, one has the text:Bloggers should be given almost unlimited freedom of speech. Only in the rarest of circumstances would we agree to limitations (have problems finding an example).The ipeg blog refers to Joff Wild at IAM, who wrote:Instinctively, I believe that there has to be a very good reason indeed to over-rule someone's right to freedom of speech...
Patenting the matchbook
Posted on September 28, 2009On Sept. 27, 2009, CBS Sunday Morning presented "The first matchbook patent " as its Almanac feature. Showing a copy of the patent, CBS mentioned the name of the "inventor" Joshua Pusey but omitted discussion of the rest of the story, which unfolded in the 1890's...
Tweets of exit polling results in German 9/27 election prematurely released?
Posted on September 28, 2009AFP reports: It is illegal in Germany to publish exit polls before the cut-off point for voting but a number of tweets claiming to show the scores for the main parties surfaced one hour before polling stations closed.The exit polls of the Twitter tweets gave numbers comparable to the first official exit polls...
Netlist files infringement suit against Inphi over US 7,532,537
Posted on September 28, 2009Inphi Corporation issued a press release responding to a press release by Netlist asserting that Inphi?s newly developed iMB ? technology infringes on Netlist?s U.S. Patent No. 7,532,537. Inphi described this as a nuisance lawsuit, which (at the time) was filed but not served...
Webcam at Denali National Park
Posted on September 27, 2009The webcam at Denali National Park, which offers a view of Mt. McKinley under appropriate conditions, runs on solar power and is basically down for the winter. However, there are some "signs of the times" which can be seen without a webcam, as discussed further below...
The Holder plagiarism case: from 1998 to 2009
Posted on September 27, 2009In 2005, the Florida state Judicial Qualifications Commission cleared Hillsborough Circuit Judge Gregory Holder of plagiarism charges. The issue was one of judicial fitness in view of a charge that Holder, an Air Force reservist in 1998, copied portions of a research paper by a fellow reservist, E...
Customer printing a secured document (such as a stamp or an airline ticket)
Posted on September 25, 2009A note to Quillen and Webster from the CAFC in KARA TECHNOLOGY v. STAMPS.COM :The claims, not specification embodiments, define the scope of patent protection. The patentee is entitled to the full scope of his claims, and we will not limit him to his preferred embodiment or import a limitation from the specification into the claims...
"Plagiarism and the College Culture": a microcosm of the patent reform debate?
Posted on September 24, 2009A review of the book by My Word!: Plagiarism and College Culture by Sara D. Blum suggests that the plagiarism debate on university campuses is quite similar to the patent debate:However, Blum suggests, the real problem of academic dishonesty arises primarily from a lack of communication between two distinct cultures within the university setting...
WhoGlue sues FaceBook for patent infringement
Posted on September 24, 2009The first claim of US 7,246,164 states:A method for managing the sharing of personal information among a plurality of users of an online relationship management system, the method comprising the steps of: receiving, from a first user of said plurality of users, an identification of a second user of said plurality of users and an assignment of a second user information access right level for said second user and receiving, from the second user, an identification of the first user; associating said second user with said first user responsive to receipt of the identification of said second user from said first user, the identification of said first user from said second user, and the second user information access right level from said first user; receiving, from said first user, first information having a first information access right after associating said second user with said first user, wherein said first information is to be entered into at least one input template of said online relationship management system to provide first structured information automatically generated from at least one output template based on said first information; transmitting, to said second user, said first information if said second user has provided the first user identification and the first information access right is consistent with the second user information access right level; receiving, from said first user, second information having a second information access right, wherein said second information is to be entered into said at least one input template of said online relationship management system; and not allowing transmission, to said second user, of said second information if the second user information access right level is inconsistent with said second information access right...
"Troll tracker case" settles
Posted on September 24, 2009Joe Mullin reported that the Frenkel/Albritton defamation case settled before jury deliberations. The key factor was a ruling by the judge that the jurors would have to find "actual malice" on the part of Cisco/Frenkel, even though Albritton was not found to be a public figure...
Is the Karma an innovation?
Posted on September 23, 2009One might file the following under "what were they thinking"?Fisker Automotive, a California manufacturer of luxury electric vehicles, will receive more than $500 million in federal loans to develop a plug-in hybrid sports car with a sticker price of nearly $90,000 and a new plug-in hybrid vehicle to be built in the United States...
University of Virginia to change definition of plagiarism?
Posted on September 22, 2009Following the ghastly treatment of Alison Routman during the "Semester at Sea" program, the University of Virginia is working on a new definition of plagiarism.The Cavalier Daily noted:The present definition begins with, ?Plagiarism is using someone?s ideas or work without proper or complete acknowledgment...
Mylan, AMD bankruptcy candidates?
Posted on September 22, 2009Two companies who have been involved in patent litigation (Mylan and AMD) showed up in yahoo.finance's Ten Big Companies That Are Veering Toward Bankruptcy:Mylan: In a classic case of management empire building, Mylan overpaid big time when it bought Merck?s generic business back in 2007 and is now stuck with $5 billion of long-term debt as a result...
To all the "next big things" that weren't
Posted on September 22, 2009Within a post titled Kappos on the US Economy, Music to My Ears at IPWatchDog, one has the text: On March 30, 2009, I wrote A Patent Proposal for Green Technology, suggesting:On July 28, 1987, President Ronald Reagan set forth what became known as the ?11-point superconductivity initiative? in a speech to the Federal Conference on Commercial Applications of Superconductivity...
Litigation over U.S. Patent No. 5,302,021, a patent with one claim
Posted on September 21, 2009The single claim of U.S. Patent No. 5,302,021, which readsA method of preventing the formation of an air pocket around rotating blades positioned in a pitcher of a blender, the air pocket being created from an air channel of a cross-sectional size defined by a member associated with the blades, comprising the steps of supplying a fluid into the pitcher, and positioning a plunger, having a cross-sectional size approximating the cross-sectional size of the member, adjacent to and above the rotating blades while maintaining the plunger free of contact with the pitcher thereby preventing the formation of an air pocket in the fluid around the rotating blades...
Article One makes more awards
Posted on September 21, 2009From a press release of Sept. 21, 09 by Article One:Article One Partners, LLC has discovered new prior art impacting the validity of two Minerva Industries, Inc. patents for mobile entertainment and communications devices. Article One also announced the discovery of new evidence which can show Eli Lilly & Company?s patent for Cymbalta to be invalid, as verified by outside counsel...
Sept. 2009: the New York Times discovers the world of patent auctions
Posted on September 21, 2009In an article on 20 Sept 09 titled Now, an Invention Inventors Will Like, Steve Lohr "discovers" the concept of buying and selling and licensing patents:Other players in the emerging patent marketplace are specialized investment banks, brokers and licensing companies including Acacia Technologies, Altitude Capital Partners, Intertrust, IPotential, Ocean Tomo, Rembrandt IP Management and Thinkfire...
Obama to talk about innovation, but what about the USPTO?
Posted on September 21, 2009At a talk at Hudson Valley Community College in Troy, NY on 21 Sept 09, President Obama will talk aboutdeveloping an advanced information technology system, restoring U.S. leadership in basic research, improving education, development of clean energy, advanced vehicle technology,information technology for use in healthcare, and promotion of U...
Was Doll pushed?
Posted on September 20, 2009In an article on John Doll titled Patent office overseer quits agency, John Schmid and Ben Poston wrote:Maryland patent attorney John White said the general view is that Doll was expected to resign under the new director."All of us felt that John Doll was not long in his job once the administration had changed, simply because he was the key architect of what Dudas had tried to do," said White, a former examiner...
DoJ weighs in AGAINST Google Books settlement
Posted on September 19, 2009AP wrote on 19 Sept 09:The U.S. Justice Department advised a federal judge Friday [Sept. 18] that a proposed legal settlement giving Google Inc. the digital rights to millions of out-of-print books threatens to thwart competition and drive up prices unless it's revised...
Lose patents, lose jobs
Posted on September 19, 2009On the announcement that Lilly will cut about 5,500 jobs, or 14 percent of its workforce:Chris Schott, an analyst with JP Morgan Chase & Co.: ?Lilly?s move is consistent with announcements by its major pharma peers and was to some degree inevitable given the company?s 2011-2014 patent cycle...
IP in movie "Duplicity"
Posted on September 18, 2009The word "patent" is mentioned twice, and text from an issued patent appears at the end, signaling the final twist in the plot. The molecule was known! [Those into patents figure out the ending seconds before the rest of the audience.]There's lots of stuff about industrial espionage, although this is a about a trade secret which isn't...
IP in the Annie Le case?
Posted on September 18, 2009One poster at websleuths has speculated on the involvement of intellectual property in the Yale murder case involving Annie Le:I agree with most of the theories so far -- workplace rage. But, I also agree that it just seems like there must be more to this...
"A high level of scientific illiteracy in the investment community"
Posted on September 18, 2009On the topic of biofuels, see the article "Interest in algae's oil prospects is growing," by Tiffany Hsu in the Los Angeles Times, which has quote from, among others, Biofuels Digest editor Jim Lane. Of companies mentioned:National energy companies are converging on the fledgling industry...
IP issues in "The Protector" (Tom Yum Goong )
Posted on September 17, 2009For future reference as to the movie "The Protector", contemplate#1. The use of "Quentin Tarantino presents"#2. The use of a Jackie Chan double in a scene in the movie
A coming Sikahema on patent oppositions: good news and bad news
Posted on September 17, 2009In a post titled Tech cos. protest patent reform in letter to Locke in the Microsoft Blog at SeattlePI, one has the textLawrence Ebert, of the Center for the Study of Digital Property, explains on the center's blog why post-grant review is controversial...
Legal issues in proxy marriages
Posted on September 17, 2009An AP story titled Proxy wedding means Marine's widow, baby unwelcome on the case of Hotaru Ferschke presents issues of conflicting law in the matter of Hotaru's marriage to the now-deceased Sgt. Michael Ferschke. Michael and Hotaru had been together in Japan for more than a year, and she was pregnant when he deployed...
Advice on the "background" section of a patent application
Posted on September 17, 2009from the 12:01Tuesday blog:If you are going to have a "Background" section, try to keep it SHORTER than the rest of the specification. Remember that the Background is the one section that is not required by statute (i.e., 112) or rule (e.g., 1.71 - 1...
Superhydrophobicity
Posted on September 17, 2009One IPBiz reader was interested in the topic of superhydrophobicity, a property defined in terms of surfaces with a water contact angle above 150° and which materials are the subject of great interest for their water repellency. One Joseph L. Lowery is the co-author of a paper titled: Electrospun Poly(Styrene-block-dimethylsiloxane) Block Copolymer Fibers Exhibiting Superhydrophobicity...
Blog coverage of Cisco/Frenkel trial in Texas
Posted on September 16, 2009In a 14 Sept 09 article in Texas Lawyer, Brenda Sapino Jeffreys writes:Legal bloggers writing about intellectual property matters are sure to take note of a trial set to start on Sept. 14 in Tyler. It pits East Texas intellectual property litigator Eric Albritton against Silicon Valley tech company Cisco Systems Inc...
Amgen and Mircera and the CAFC decision
Posted on September 16, 2009from the AP:Thousand Oaks, Calif.-based Amgen ( AMGN - news - people ) said the Boston-based 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Roche ( RHHBY.PK - news - people ) Group's rival product, Mircera, infringes on four Amgen patents. The patents relate to genetically engineered erythropoietin, a hormone that stimulates red blood cell production, and to the processes used for making it...
On picnic coolers in science and learning from each other
Posted on September 15, 2009In 2009, the use of a picnic cooler ("beer cooler") was highlighted in the story The $150 Space Camera: MIT Students Beat NASA On Beer-Money Budget:The two students (from MIT, of course) put together a low-budget rig to fly a camera high enough to photograph the curvature of the Earth...
Patent reform 2009: least likely of the unlikely?
Posted on September 15, 2009An article by Grant Gross in PCWorld titled Technology Issues on Back Burner in US Congress mentioned five technical issues before Congress that are sitting on the back burner, of which patent reform was mentioned dead last. Thus, as to Congressional action, patent reform might be viewed as the least likely of the unlikely...
"INS v. AP" in the 21st century: ABC, CNBC on Obama/Kanye West story
Posted on September 15, 2009In the context of the Hartford Courant plagiarism matter, IPBiz mentioned the relatively old Supreme Court case of INS v. AP to discuss some of the 21st century issues in the Courant situation. The INS case also has relevance to the Obama/Kanye West matter, because of the shared fiber optic line of CNBC and ABC ...
"if an author?s writings are not findable through Google then they are rather irrelevant"
Posted on September 14, 2009The text -- if an author?s writings are not findable through Google then they are rather irrelevant. -- appears in a comment by Gene Quinn to a post by Gene Quinn [Hal Wegner, You Now Have My Full Attention ] that concerns comments made by Hal Wegner concerning Gene Quinn in Hal's newsletter of 12 Sept 09...
A question in trademark
Posted on September 13, 2009In a previous post, IPBiz mentioned the appearance of the Party Dolls at Duke Island Park on 28 June 09. This is how they appeared:Fast forward to 12 September 2009, with the location Veterans Park in Hamilton Township, New Jersey. This is how they appeared:Trademark law, in theory, is to protect the consumer against likelihood of confusion, although in practice it serves to protect the mark owner against knock-offs...
Plagiarism and the firing of UN-Reno professor
Posted on September 13, 2009In a story about the firing of a University of Nevada-Reno professor, one finds the text:But in a three-page letter, Glick agreed with the committee?s finding that Hussein plagiarized from his graduate students by sending excerpts from their master?s theses to donating corporations...
Microsoft gets new trial on damages in Alcatel case on Day patent
Posted on September 13, 2009Discussing the recent CAFC decision in Alcatel v. Microsoft, Kurt Mackie of Redmondmag.com located the CAFC in Southern California:The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Southern California denied Microsoft's appeal of the infringement charge, but ordered a new trial to reassess the damages portion of the judgment...
The superficiality of analysis by McAfee
Posted on September 12, 2009An IPBiz reader sent along the following from McAfeeSiteAdvisor:ipbiz.blogspot.com/2009/08/patent-applications-from-prison.html may try to steal your information.Why were you redirected to this page? When we visited this site, we found it may be designed to trick you into submitting your financial or personal information to online scammers...
Transistor errors
Posted on September 12, 2009In Paths of innovation: technological change in 20th century America by David C. Mowery and Nathan Rosenberg, one has the assertion on page 125 that the 1956 consent decree led AT&T/Bell to license its transistor technology at nominal fees. In fact, AT&T was licensing at nominal fees BEFORE 1956 and BEFORE the consent decree...
"The Ellen DeGeneres Show" sued for copyright infringement
Posted on September 11, 2009The AP story included the following text:According to the suit filed Wednesday [9 Sept 09] in U.S. District Court in Nashville, when representatives of the recording companies asked defendants why they hadn't obtained licenses to use the songs, defendants said they didn't "roll that way...
Balsillie of RIM blazing new legal trails?
Posted on September 11, 2009Remember NTP vs. RIM, and the $612.5 million settlement? Jim Balsillie's offer of $242.5 million for the Phoenix Coyotes is making news in another legal area, that of bankruptcy:The Toronto Star notes:The league [the National Hockey League] also has the support of the other major pro sports leagues, which don't want a bankruptcy judge to force an owner [eg, Balsillie] and a market on a league that wants neither...
"Catch and release" model is catching
Posted on September 11, 2009Recall the recent flurry of media coverage over the "catch and release" model of Intellectual Ventures? [IPBiz: Intellectual Ventures' "catch and release" gambit]Allied Security Trust is doing a similar thing. From Ars Technica:Zemlin's comments about Microsoft are a response to a patent auction carried out by Microsoft to sell a number of patents that the company allegedly said were related to Linux...
BIO on patent reform 2009
Posted on September 11, 2009PatentDocs has the following text:Andrew Noyes from Congress Daily asked about patent reform, and Brent Delmonte, BIO's Vice President for Governmental Relations said that BIO hopes for support for the Senate bill, a "fair, responsible compromise," and that contentious bills (like H...
Teenage cut and paste: copying without reading?
Posted on September 11, 2009An article on a survey by Cranfield School of Management has the following text:Research suggests that 60 per cent of teenagers have copied and pasted information straight from the web into their schoolwork without even reading it.The study, based on results at ONE school and reported by Andrew Kakabadse, originated in Britain:The study, based on a sample of around 260 pupils aged from 11 to 18 at a secondary school in the Midlands, raised fresh concerns that modern technology was having a disruptive effect on young people...
Seinfeld defends/wins copyright infringement case
Posted on September 11, 2009Jessica Seinfeld, wife of Jerry, successfully defended in SD NY against a copyright infringement suit brought by Missy Chase Lapine.In terms of bad reportng, note the text:The judge in New York threw out the plagiarism and copyright and trademark infringement case, which Seinfeld's lawyer called "a complete victory for Jessica Seinfeld...
Truth in advertising: the meaning of "other whitefish"
Posted on September 10, 2009Within a story by WILLIAM J. BROAD in the NYT titled From Deep Pacific, Ugly and Tasty, With a Catch about the use of hoki in various fish sandwiches, one has the text:Now, Ben Golden, a Yum Brands spokesman [Yum owns Long John Silver?s ], said hoki was ?not on the menu...
Joseph Wu of Stanford on iPS cells
Posted on September 08, 2009A CNN story titled Study: Human fat yields multipurpose stem cells about work of Dr. Joseph Wu at Stanford was interesting for what it did NOT mention.There is not one word about iZumi, which bought up the rights on iPS from Bayer, which work preceded the Yamanaka work on iPS...
District court upholds jury verdict against Medtronic in Synthes case
Posted on September 07, 2009Reuters reported: "We are pleased that the court has upheld the jury's verdict," said Michel Orsinger, president and chief executive of Synthes.The patent infringement case involved the Maverick, A-Mav and O-Mav brand devices of Medtronic.Medtronic is appealing to the CAFC...
IN RE ROBERT SKVORECZ: confusion over comprising?
Posted on September 07, 2009The Skvorecz case examines the meaning of a fundamental term used in claim drafting, the word "comprising."In a re-issue proceeding, the claim was:1. A wire chafing stand comprising a first [an upper] rim of wire steel which forms a closed geometrical configuration circumscribing a first surface area, [a lower rim of wire steel forming a closed geometrical configuration circumscribing a second surface area with said first surface area being larger than said second surface area] and having at least two [a plurality of] wire legs with each wire leg having two upright sections interconnected to one another [at a location below the lower rim] in a configuration forming a base support for the stand to rest upon with each upright section extending upwardly from said base support to from an angle equal to or greater than 90° with respect to a horizontal plane through said base support and being affixed to the first [upper] rim adjacent one end thereof [and to said lower rim at a relatively equal distance below the point of attachment to said upper rim] and further comprising a plurality of offsets located either in said upright sections of said wire legs or in said first [upper] rim for laterally displacing each wire leg relative to said first [upper] rim to facilitate the nesting of a multiplicity of stands into one another without significant wedging...
News aggregation as copyright infringement?
Posted on September 07, 2009While Frank James of NPR gave a superficial account of the plagiarism issues with the Hartford Courant [ see America's oldest newspaper apologizes for plagiarism ], Chris Powell, managing editor of the Journal Inquire, delved into the underlying rationale of "why" the Hartford Courant has been copying text from its smaller Connecticut rivals...
Duke Island Park. Concerts. Summer 2009.
Posted on September 06, 2009The last event In the Duke Island Park Summer 2009 Concert Series was the New Rascals on 30 Aug 09 [above]. In the white shirt is Gene Cornish, guitarist and original founding member of the Rascals (a.k.a. the Young Rascals). On drums is Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Vocal Group Hall of Fame's Dino Danelli...
"Is intellectual property law a scam?"
Posted on September 06, 2009In a thread on "JD Underground" titled "Is intellectual property law a scam?", LBE got a boost from one "henryhazlitt"-->Kinsella is an interesting fellahttp://ipbiz.blogspot.com/2007/12/kinsellas-post-on-patent-reform-insipid.htmlI would second Ebert's arguments that the patent system is not about "innovation" and therefore Kinsella's utilitarian argument is moot...
Of Yale Law School grads...
Posted on September 06, 2009from a news post about the recent resignation of Van Jones: [Howard] Dean pointed to Jones' credentials as a Yale Law School graduate ... Though Jones signed a 2004 statement calling for an investigation into possible Bush administration involvement in the Sept...
What "The Beatles: Rock Band" teaches about innovation
Posted on September 06, 2009In a review of The Beatles: Rock Band by Randy Lewis in the LA Times, one finds some patent-related terms:But one consequence of actually attempting to replicate their words, melodies, harmonies and rhythms in Rock Band is a more visceral sense of just how inventive their music was -- and remains, even 40-plus years down the long and winding road...
"Citizens United": like patent reform, you need a scorecard
Posted on September 05, 2009Bill Moyers' Journal on 4 Sept 09 had a debate of sorts between Trevor Potter and Floyd Abrams over issues surrounding Citizens United v. The Federal Election Commission, which has grown from a limited question about a political documentary (concerning Hillary Clinton) to a broad challenge to the government's right to restrict corporations from spending money to support or oppose political candidates...
Criminalizing patent infringement?
Posted on September 05, 2009from cpaglobal-->In letter to Lord Mandelson, Trevor Baylis argued that criminalizing patent theft would divert lawsuits from the expensive civil system and give lone inventors access to financial support from the State.Some patent practitioners have taken exception to this view...
Fictional chemist Hapner on zoominfo
Posted on September 05, 2009The fictional, constructed chemist Theodore Hapner has his own profile on zoominfo: Theodore HapnerMaverick Chemist.See also"Theodore Hapner" making the rounds
America's oldest newspaper apologizes for plagiarism
Posted on September 05, 2009On 4 Sept. 09, Richard J. Graziano CEO, President & Publisher of the Hartford Courant, apologized for recent plagiarism by the Hartford Courant, noting in part:In short, after an extensive internal review, we have determined that over the last several weeks The Courant plagiarized the work of some of our competitors...
Martek case on definitions, priority, enablement, corroboration
Posted on September 04, 2009The Martek case illustrates that one will get the definition one presents in a specification, even if that definitionis not consistent with the rest of the specification. The key question was relatively simple: are humans members of theanimal kingdom? The majority said "yes" -->For the foregoing reasons, we hold that the district court?s claim construction is erroneous...
NYT gives arguments against the current patent reform proposals
Posted on September 04, 2009The 4 Sept 09 NYT has an article by Scott Shane titled Protecting the Patent System for Entrepreneurs.Alluding to current patent reform bills [H.R. 1260 and S. 515 ], the article cites to Mario Calderini and Giuseppe Scellato on problems with the gaming of the opposition process in Europe...
Goodbye Gasoline?
Posted on September 04, 2009Channel 12.3 (WHYY) re-broadcast on 3 Sept 09 the Alan Alda Scientific American show "Goodbye Gasoline.".The show includes the observation that DaimlerChrysler plans to sell fuel cell vehicles to commercial fleet operators by 2010.Perhaps one could include "Goodbye DaimlerChrysler" as an update...
Wikipedia and global warming
Posted on September 04, 2009Bob Park's 28 Aug 09 WN has two entries about Wikipedia, then goes on to global warming:Newspapers around the country have carried the story of the US Chamber of Commerce, the top US lobbying group, calling for the EPA to hold a Scopes- like hearing on the evidence that climate change is man-made...
Solo inventor goes after 3 universities for infringement
Posted on September 04, 2009An AP report notes that Soheil Sharafabadi filed suit "this summer" against the University of Idaho, Washington State University and Oregon State University. Sharafabadi has one issued US patent, 4,980,186 [ Pseudoplastic yellow mustard gum ], which was filed on August 14, 1989 and which issued on December 25, 1990 ...
TechDirt trashes Locke and Kappos
Posted on September 02, 2009In a post Commerce Secretary, New USPTO Head Suggesting They Want More Patents, Approved Faster, TechDirt goes after Locke and Kappos. TechDirt has the usual non sequitur: The real problem, which becomes evident in reading the article is that since the USPTO is funded based on patent application fees, it has every incentive in the world, as an institution, to approve more patents...
Provisional rights, 35 USC 154(d)
Posted on September 02, 2009In passing, note that the issue of pre-grant damages (provisional rights) was addressed in Pandora Jewelry, LLC v. Chamilia, LLC (D. Md. 2008). Patentee did not get them.See alsoPandora Jewelry, LLC v. Chamilla LLC, No. 03-07587 (S.D.N.Y. Nov. 26, 2003) and later SDNY case-->?The existence of an actual controversy is an absolute predicate for declaratory judgment jurisdiction...
"Hypothesize, experiment, litigate"
Posted on September 02, 2009In the October 2008 issue of Photonics/Spectra, Amanda Francoeur has an article Gordon Gould's Scientific "Patent" Method which comprises the steps of hypothesize, experiment and litigate.The article mentions that Gould originally thought he needed a working model of the laser, and that Gould went to TRG (Technical Research Group), but had issues with his security clearance because of a prior association with the communist party...
McKenna on Bessen and Meurer
Posted on September 02, 2009IP lightweight Barrie McKenna pushes Bessen and Meurer:New research by Boston University law professors James Bessen and Michael Meurer, published in their 2008 book Patent Failure, paints a sobering look at patents in the digital age. Aside from pharmaceutical and chemical manufacturers, companies in all other industries now spend vastly more on litigation than they generate in profits from their patents...
Plagiarism of websites on the rise
Posted on September 02, 2009Carrie-Ann Skinner, writing about a report by FastHosts, noted:According to research by the web hosting firm, there has been an 89 percent increase in the number of complaints about website material such as text, artwork and product images that has been used by other companies on their websites since April 2008...
Intellectual Ventures' "catch and release" gambit
Posted on September 02, 2009The initial game plan of Intellectual Ventures was based on the presumed preference of (potential) infringers to license rather than litigate. That is now being supplemented by a strategy of threatening to sell IV patents to other parties, who might be more disposed to litigate...
Trademark rights as to Cuban products
Posted on September 01, 2009Trademark issues concerning Cuban products are a big deal.From Rum, cigars Cuban in name only [AP]:Cuba said it registered the Havana Club trademark in the United States in 1976 after the Arechabalas let their claim on it expire. It has sold the rum internationally since 1993 in a joint partnership with French spirits consortium Pernod Ricard...
"This is not entirely untrue"
Posted on September 01, 2009Text from the Time/news.yahoo article titled The AARP and Seniors: Clashing Views on Health Reform:Judging by comments at town-hall meetings, the elderly are also fearful that Democratic proposals would take funding away from Medicare to pay for coverage for Americans who don't currently have health insurance...
?At best plagiarism, at worst outright theft.??
Posted on August 31, 2009Michael Schroeder, publisher of the Bristol Press and New Britain Herald [CT], described certain re-publication without attribution practices of the Hartford Courant: ?at best plagiarism, at worst outright theft." [as quoted in an AP story]As they say at the Harvard Business Review: Plagiarize with pride!
Superluminal propagation: nine years later
Posted on August 31, 2009In a post on 12:01Tuesday titled Patented: Formula for Computing Wind Chill about US 7,578,615, there is a comment about a DIFFERENT patent, US 7,126,691:I like to think of it more as an "exercise" or an "experiment" than a "joke". I believe that the U...
Patent reform and political realism
Posted on August 31, 2009On June 19, 2007, IPBiz presented text of Ted Kennedy on patent reform:U.S. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy said today [June 18] that the biotech and traditional high tech industries need to come to agreement about how patent laws should be updated rather than pursue conflicting agendas through Congress...
"More of a business"?
Posted on August 31, 2009A post Wolverines blow the whistle on Michigan's 'absurd' workouts contains the words:Three returning offensive linemen quit the team [before the first spring practice in 2008], including starting guard Justin Boren, who blasted the new administration for eroding the program's "family values" en route to arch rival Ohio State...
Patent applications from prison?
Posted on August 30, 2009IPBiz has discussed the matter of Jonathan Nyce previously. [22 Jan 2006: The Bayh-Dole Act and murder [the case of Jonathan Nyce]].IPBiz noticed two patent applications, filed in 2008 and published in 2009, from Jonathan Nyce. US 20090054385 (12/196233), titled SOLID INHALATION FORMULATIONS OF DEHYDROEPIANDROSTERONE DERIVATIVES, was filed August 21, 2008 and lists as inventor: NYCE; Jonathan W...
Intellectual Ventures travels to India
Posted on August 29, 2009Like JEB Stuart, Intellectual Ventures have travelled to India. Note the Forbes interview with Ashok Misra, Chairman, India and Head of Global Alliances, Intellectual Ventures, which article is titled We Aren't a Patent Troll.See alsoJEB Stuart travels to India
Medical ghostwriting: like steroids and baseball?
Posted on August 28, 2009An article by NATASHA SINGER in the NYT titled Medical Papers by Ghostwriters Pushed Therapy includes the text:?It?s almost like steroids and baseball,? said Dr. Joseph S. Ross, an assistant professor of geriatrics at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, who has conducted research on ghostwriting...
"Patent litigation will be reduced to a free-for-all"?
Posted on August 28, 2009Microsoft's appeal brief in the i4i case (which produced an injunction as to Word) states:if the ED Texas ruling stands, "Patent litigation will be reduced to a free-for-all, unbounded by the requirements of the substantive law or the rules of evidence or trial procedure...
Monkeys, or humans?
Posted on August 27, 2009A headline:GM monkeys with DNA of THREE parents raises hope of eradicating incurable diseasesScientists have produced four baby monkeys who each have three biological parents.IPBiz newsflash: courtesy of cytoplasmic transfer (done in NJ) , we already have HUMANS with the DNA of THREE parents.
TiVo sues Verizon and AT&T
Posted on August 27, 2009In still another chapter in the TiVo story, TiVo is now going after Verizon and AT&T, alleging three patent infringements by the country?s two biggest wireless carriers.See earlier IPBiz post:Another chapter in TiVo versus EchoStar, and another chapter in bad reporting of patent matters
A right to Terceva?
Posted on August 27, 2009In 2005, hcrenewal.blogspot.com wrote of the drug Terceva:The New York Times recently reported on the high prices paid for drugs to treat cancer, notably the newer "targeted therapies." Some examples included:$54,000 per year for Avastatin, made by Genentech,$31,000 per year for Terceva, made by Genentech, and$25,000 for Thalidomid, made by Celgene...
Ortho gets mixed decision in appeal of D NJ case
Posted on August 26, 2009ORTHO-MCNEIL PHARMACEUTICAL v. TEVA is a patent law appeal from a D NJ order granting summary judgment of invalidity based on anticipation and obviousness. Part of the case turns on unexpected results:Ortho-McNeil can rebut the prima facie case if it can show that the prior art teaches away from the claimed range, or the claimed range produces new and unexpected results over the prior art range...
CAFC judges soon to fall like dominos?
Posted on August 26, 2009Marcia Coyle [Tom Schoenberg ] at Legal Times wrote on 26 Aug 2009:President Obama this fall will have his first opportunity to put his stamp on the patent-heavy U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. Judge Alvin Schall recently told the White House that he will take senior status in October...
Plagiarism punished in Canada
Posted on August 26, 2009Claude Robinson began a $2.53-million Quebec Superior Court copyright infringement lawsuit against Cinar and other defendants in July 1996 asserting they stole a cartoon character he created, and won a judgment of $5.2-million in August 2009, 13 years later...
IPBiz #10 blawg on blawgsearch
Posted on August 26, 2009Once again, IPBiz barely managed to squeak by "Patent Troll Tracker" in rankings by blawgsearch. The top 15 blawgs:Most Popular Blawgs TodaySex Offender Issues [feed]Covers sex offender laws and cases.Last Updated: August 25, 2009 - Rank Today: 1http://sexoffenderissues...
Cardiac Pacemakers and 271(f)
Posted on August 25, 2009An August 24 post at istockanalyst begins:Technology majors Intel, Apple, Cisco and Microsoft have won an appeals court ruling that limits the amount of patent damages they will have to pay for products shipped outside the US.Huh? The case in question is the CAFC's Cardiac Pacemakers v...
"Accidental emailer" Alycia Lane lands job at KNBC
Posted on August 23, 2009A Los Angeles Times story on Alycia Lane, former Philadelphia KYW TV news anchor who has landed a job at KNBC, includes the text: In May 2007, Lane defended sending e-mails and suggestive photos of herself in a bikini to NFL Network anchor Rich Eisen and, accidentally, his wife...
Plagiarism in Huffington Post?
Posted on August 23, 2009Aisha Curry has accused Tameka Foster [Raymond] of plagiarism in an article of Foster's in the Huffington Post, She's Pretty For A Dark Skinned Girl, which begins:I am a dark-skinned African American woman with features that reflect my ancestry. Debates regarding Light vs...
Unintended consequences of Clunkers program?
Posted on August 23, 2009In a post titled Cash for Clunkers to end Monday [Aug. 24] night, Jenny Munro writes:The program, expected to produce 250,000 new-car sales by November, will have generated more than 700,000 in about a month.Someone had a post back in July that few people would benefit from the program [below]...
On herding entrepreneurs and innovation
Posted on August 21, 2009In July 2009, Michael Arrington (founder of TechCrunch and proclaimed undisputed king maker of Silicon Valley Internet startups) interviewed Gary Reback, antitrust lawyer. Within the text Google?s Looming Antitrust Issues, one found a line about therecovery by major companies of the ability to dominate their markets and to herd entrepreneurs and innovation and to damage consumers...
US 20090195392, Sony's laugh detector patent application
Posted on August 20, 2009The abstract for Sony's patent application 12/023951 titled LAUGH DETECTOR AND SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR TRACKING AN EMOTIONAL RESPONSE TO A MEDIA PRESENTATION includes QUESTIONS:Information in the form of emotional responses to a media presentation may be passively collected, for example by a microphone and/or a camera...
Merck beats Teva on Singulair in D NJ
Posted on August 20, 2009As had been predicted, Merck beat Teva on Singulair in D NJ in Trenton before Judge Garrett Brown, who previously had been involved in the Florida Prepaid Postsecondary case.Text at Bloomberg suggested Merck prevailed by presentation of secondary considerations to rebut a prima facie case of obviousness:Merck ?put forth sufficient evidence of the failed attempts of others to develop a leukotriene antagonist,? Brown said in his opinion...
Is a bazaar economy based on innovative technology?
Posted on August 20, 2009A thread at the 271blog, titled Revisiting the Presumption of Validity, and seemingly directed to Alan Devlin's 2008 law review article in Southwestern University Law Review, has re-channeled into a discussion of "why" Germany is the world's leading exporter...
Geron blames air-bags for lack of progress?!?
Posted on August 20, 2009IPBiz has posted on Geron many times, including some rather interesting patent stories. A post on TheStreet on August 19 concerning an FDA clinical hold on Geron tests included some rather interesting text.First, one had a complaint about lack of achievement:My beef with Geron is the company's chronic under-achievement, except when it comes to spending shareholders' money...
CIRM to share ?instructive negative research? results
Posted on August 19, 2009A post on californiastemcellreport notes:One matter that may trouble many scientists is what may be a reluctance to share information outside of the CIRM research community. The strategic plan discusses sharing ?instructive negative research? results within its own community...
Examiners: ?We?re the ones who put ?no? in innovation?
Posted on August 19, 2009A rambling story by John Schmid and Ben Poston titled Patent rejections soar as pressure on agency rises includes the text:?We?re the ones who put ?no? in innovation,? goes a joke that circulates in the agency?s corridors, according to an examiner who requested anonymity because the agency won?t let examiners speak with reporters...
X-ray fluoroscopy and paintings
Posted on August 19, 2009A story by Alan Boyle details results from an interesting paper by Jennifer Mass, an expert on art conservation at the University of Delaware, presented at the national meeting of the American Chemical Society in Washington DC about the use of x-ray fluoroscopy to image paintings beneath paintings...
ED Mich invalidates Lilly Gemzar patent
Posted on August 18, 2009Back in March 2007, IPBiz noted that generic drug companies were arguing Lilly could not have both a composition patent and a method of use patent on Gemzar ["The paragraph IV challengers argue that either the compound or method of use are obvious and can't be protected by a patent...
Who is Rick Clark?
Posted on August 17, 2009In a nearly throw-away line at the end of a post on resume-writing, one had the text:When a job opening gives you a chance to write a cover letter, write a good one! Take 15 or 20 minutes to research the employer online (visiting the company's own website and news sites, for starters) in order to say something company-specific in your cover letter...
Gold-plating, again
Posted on August 17, 2009To the 271 blog, concerning Revisiting the Presumption of ValidityYour link to the Lichtman/Lemley work takes one to an SSRN abstract. Note that this Lichtman/Lemley work appeared in the Stanford Law Review in 2007: Rethinking Patent Law's Presumption of Validity, 60 Stanford Law Review 45 (2007), right around the time then-candidate Obama started talking about gold-plated patents...
On when to read the scientific literature [?]
Posted on August 17, 2009from an interview with Irving Weissman:Probably the best advice came from the late Donald Michie; he was both an immunologist and one of the founders of the field of artificial intelligence. He told me in 1962 that when he began a project, he quit reading the literature...
"Where does inspiration become plagiarism?"
Posted on August 17, 2009In a post on the latest Stephenie Meyer flap, Tim Martin asks the question Where does inspiration become plagiarism?Mike Masnick at TechDirt would likely answer Never!Martin also asks And most importantly, can the plagiarism of intellectual property ever be proved?IPBiz, of course, notes that plagiarism and copyright infringement are two different matters...
Acushnet gets new trial in Callaway infringement assertion
Posted on August 17, 2009In a story on 17 August, AP brushed aside the impact of the 14 August CAFC decision in the Callaway case:KeyBanc analyst Scott W. Hamann, who rates the stock "Buy," also said investors will find the ruling not as negative as initially thought. Hamann said the timing of a resolution has now been delayed, but that a trial will likely be expedited this time around...
Fark on patent examiners at the patent office
Posted on August 16, 2009Lots of picture variants and the lines: GeeGee LOL, nice touch on the one in his hand. I wonder what could be patented in that field... AND Thank you for noticing that! I've been wanting to add a little steampunk to a shop for a while now. Thought the Patent Office might be a good choice...
Lerner says patent reform is "cold war"; IPBiz says "doughnuts!"
Posted on August 16, 2009The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel quoted "Innovation and Its Discontents" co-author Josh Lerner:"I see it as a cold war between pharmaceuticals and the IT industry," said Josh Lerner, a professor at the Harvard Business School.While the "cold war" analogy to the 1950's is a simple, if inapplicable, image, IPBiz goes back further...
In a Sikahema move, R. Ebert labels A. White a troll
Posted on August 15, 2009In the movie review business, a contrarian can be labelled a ?troll,? an Internet term for someone whose intent is to provoke others. In the patent law business, a troll can include a patent holder, who does not make product, who sues an infringer, who does...
Plagiarism in Facebook account by Mazrich? Summers, again.
Posted on August 14, 2009Aaron Greenspan (who wrote ?Authoritas: One Student?s Harvard Admissions and the Founding of the Facebook Era??) has accused Ben Mezrich (who wrote ?The Accidental Billionaires?? ) of copying from Aaron's book (plagiarism) AND of mischaracterization and embellishment of the Facebook story...
Demise of the (anti-)Doughnut campaign: a parable of patent reform?
Posted on August 14, 2009Dr. Jason Newsom lost his position at the Bay County (Florida) Health Department over his campaign against fatty foods, most particularly doughnuts.An AP story notes that doughnut selling lawyers were partly to blame for the demise: A county commissioner who owns a doughnut shop and two lawyers who own a new Dunkin' Donuts on Panama City Beach turned against him ...
Dust bunnies and McKenzie on Microsoft Word
Posted on August 14, 2009In a post about the MS Word injunction titled Get A Grip: Microsoft Word Isn't Going Anywhere, Matthew McKenzie writes:The peanut gallery is already screaming that Microsoft -- a company practiced in the art of dodgy patent claims -- is simply getting what it deserved...
Truth in advertising?
Posted on August 13, 2009The US News and World Report has an article on "bad" tactics by potential employers, which article beginsWhen it comes to hiring, some employers act like they hold all the cards--and they can treat job seekers as poorly as they want, without consequence...
Questionable news coverage of i4i and Microsoft
Posted on August 13, 2009Tony Bradley writes about i4i and Microsoft and MS Word in a post titled: 5 Reasons Word Will Weather the Patent Challenge:** 1. The i4i patent is vague. Have you seen the patent in question? The actual patent is attached as Exhibit A to the original court papers filed by i4i...
Former grad student Sclimenti still moving against Stanford
Posted on August 13, 2009Joyce Liu and Eugenah Chou of The Stanford Daily provide new information on the lawsuit by former graduate student Christopher Sclimenti Ph.D. ?02 against Stanford University and his former professor Michele Calos in an article titledFormer Ph.D. student accuses professor of plagiarism...
More on the Verfaille matter in stem cells
Posted on August 12, 2009The californiastemcellreport discusses the renewed investigation by New Scientist of charges of data manipulation by adult stem cell worker Catherine Verfaillie. Verfaille currently is a reviewer of proposals for CIRM and a COMMENTER to the stem cell report stated:As for CIRM, if Verfaille truly is that competitive and unscrupulous to knowingly allow multiple instances of data finagling to come from her lab, then she shouldn't be privy to the information in CIRM grants...
Bam! Zechariah declares CAFC to be anti-patent
Posted on August 12, 2009On 7 Aug 09, the 271Blog had a post which began:Manasseh Zechariah, economist and assistant professor at Johnson & Wales University College of Business, decided to take groups of decisions from the CAFC, and run variables related to those decisions through different theoretical models to see what came out...
Patent infringers as criminals? Microsoft and Microsoft Word and i4i.
Posted on August 12, 2009Larry Dignan has a post titled: Examine the patent that made selling Microsoft Word a crime.IPBiz to Dignan: there are no criminal provisions in the US patent code as to infringement. [but see below]Dignan is examining an injunction against Microsoft arising from a case brought by i4i:According to the injunction, Microsoft is enjoined from selling ?Microsoft Word 2003, Microsoft Word 2007, and Microsoft Word products not more than colorably different from Microsoft Word 2003 or Microsoft Word 2007...
I.G. Farben and Exxon, re-visited
Posted on August 09, 2009In an earlier post on IPBiz [ Standard Oil and I.G. Farben: patents and antitrust ], the interrelationship of I.G. Farben and Standard Oil of New Jersey [now ExxonMobil] was discussed.GoogleBooks has an excerpt from Antitrust and the formation of the postwar world by Wyatt C...
On debates about stem cells: the carbon nanotube connection
Posted on August 09, 2009An article in Nature by David Cyranoski & Monya Baker [Stem-cell claim gets cold reception; Carbon nanotubes used to reprogramme adult human cells? Nature 452, 132 (2008) ] produced the following on-line commentary:We need a correct understanding of what a stem cell in order to evaluate the magic claims on 'stem cells'!!! ------- On February 2, 2007 Rudolf Jaenisch wrote to me that "these people seem not quite understand the key issues of interpreting NT [nuclear transfer] experiments" when he read my criticism on a 'milestone' publication in Nature Biotechnology (NBT)...
Footnote to Madey v. Duke University: Duke goes after insuror for legal fees
Posted on August 09, 2009James Gallagher, in an article titled Duke sues insurer to cover costs of Madey-laser suit gives a suggestion of "how much" Duke paid in the litigation against John Madey, which was ultimately unsuccessful:Randall Roden, an attorney with Tharrington Smith who represented Madey, says he doesn?t believe the $5 million limit on Duke?s insurance policy with Coregis would cover the legal costs and settlement, adding that he wouldn?t be surprised if Duke spent $5 million on legal fees alone...
Bilski brief of the University of South Florida
Posted on August 09, 2009The amicus brief of the University of South Florida (USF) in Bilski begins:The University of South Florida (hereinafter, ?USF?) is the nation?s ninth largest public university and a leading research institution.[See also Three Florida universities in "top 10" in nation for enrollmentThe USF amicus brief spends time discussingClassen Immunotherapies, Inc...
High stakes for CERN's large hadron collider
Posted on August 09, 2009AP writer ALEXANDER G. HIGGINS has a story on CERN's large hadron collider titled Particle collider: Black hole or crucial machine?. [As to names, see also Higgs Boson Found ]Within the Higgins article:CERN has been working since late last year to repair the damage caused by a faulty electrical joint...
Prison poet plagiarists
Posted on August 09, 2009In June 2008, when IPBiz was discussing the Palo Alto High School plagiarism incident (the graduation speeches had been copied from elsewhere), one commenter wrotePerhaps this ought to be taken as a lesson that "life isn't fair" for those who were denied in favor of Abid and Veerappan's cribbing abilities...
Patents, and the assassination of President Lincoln
Posted on August 08, 2009The military trial of those involved in the assassination of President Lincoln was presided over by Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt. Holt, a Southerner from Kentucky and a lawyer, supported James Buchanan in the presidential election of 1856, and, as a reward, was appointed Commissioner of Patents, which position he held until 1859, when he became Postmaster General, and advanced to Secretary of War upon the resignation of John B...
Kappos confirmed as USPTO Director
Posted on August 08, 2009Eliot Marshall of Science noted on August 7: David Kappos, IBM's former vice president and chief patent attorney, has been approved by the Senate to be the new director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.See also IBM's US 7,571,105: issues of patent quality and exam quality
Indirect self-plagiarism?
Posted on August 08, 2009Of the matter of the retraction of Nayernia group paper published in Stem Cells and Development on 8 July 09, the journal Science gave details that the plagiarism in question involved a word-for-word discussion of prior Nayernia group work taken from a review article by Makoto Nagano of McGill University in Montreal that appeared in Biology of Reproduction...
IBM's US 7,571,105: issues of patent quality and exam quality
Posted on August 07, 2009The blog "12:01pm Tuesday" ( Aaron R. Feigelson ) has a post ( IBM Upsells Patent to PTO ) on another problematic issued IBM patent, 7,571,105.The post has the (ridiculous) base patent claim, but the following analysis from the post is even more interesting (bolding added):Note the extra computer beef there in bold...
NLJ story mangles analysis of Exergen case?
Posted on August 07, 2009In a story titled Federal Circuit Clamps Down on Patent Attorney Misconduct Claims, Sheri Qualters writes in the National Law Journal (NLJ):Exergen's 11-and-a-half page discussion about misconduct claims tied its pleading standards directly to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure's fraud pleading standards...
On being hailed into far-away courts based upon allegations of IP infringement?
Posted on August 07, 2009Cases in copyright law, unlike those in patent law, are reviewed in the regional circuit courts. In a copyright case in California, CA9 found personal jurisdiction in ND Cal in a situation wherein a San Diego law firm (Recordon & Recordon, the defendant ) allegedly copied from a Novato, Calif...
While wandering New Jersey...
Posted on August 06, 2009Jersey rainbowJersey moth, RVCCPrinceton Battlefield, July 4, 2009.
Duke Island Park. Somerset County 2009 SUMMER CONCERT SERIES
Posted on August 06, 2009The Party Dolls began the season, on June 28.Lil' Ed and the Blues Imperials, direct from Chicago, on July 12.LBE was photographed while taking this picture, and appeared on page A3 of the Bridgewater Courier-News on July 13.The Duprees on July 19, 200913th Annual Bayou Fest on July 26, 2009, JEFFERY BROUSSARD & CREOLE COWBOYSBluegrass on August 2, 2009, with THE GIBSON BROTHERS, from upstate New York...
Exergen on inequitable conduct: the right direction for the CAFC?
Posted on August 06, 2009In addition to IPBiz's post on the Exergen case, at least three other blogs highlighted the inequitable conduct portion of the case, although none of these three made reference to footnote 2, about attorney conduct IN the litigation.CAFC (Really) Tightens Pleading Requirements for Inequitable Conduct Inequitable Conduct Ruling Gives Pleading Rules Real TeethParticular Inequitable Conduct A COMMENTER to the patenthawk blog DID state of footnote 2:Exergen?s patent counsel may have dodged the IC bullet, but Exergen still lost big-time and Exergen's trial counsel still got her bottom smacked for her trial techniques...
RPX says NPE litigation fraction is on the rise in 2009
Posted on August 06, 2009On 30 July 2009, the RPX blog noted:According to Patent Freedom statistics, in 2008 there were 2,806 patent cases in the United States. Of these, 359 ? or 12.8% ? were NPE-driven suits. Looking at PACER and Lexis/Nexis data through June 30 of this year, we see that while overall patent litigation activity has actually slowed, the incidence of NPE cases is higher...
CIRM's position on bio-similars
Posted on August 05, 2009Senator Feinstein included a copy of a letter from CIRM to Feinstein within her letter to Senators Kennedy and Dodd on legislation on bio-similars (generic biologics in Affordable Choices Act). Within the CIRM letter, there is a portion attacking a report of the FTC which portion includes the words:According to the FTC, corporations typically fund incremental innovation to support pre-existing core business...
Obviousness upheld against Bayer in Yasmin case
Posted on August 05, 2009In a 2-1 vote, obviousness (found in D NJ) was upheld by the CAFC.The dissent of Judge Newman:With all respect to my colleagues, I do not share their view that it would have been obvious to do that which was indisputably unobvious to the experienced formulation scientists whose assignment was to formulate the known product drospirenone...
CAFC overturns USPTO and SDNY in pro se Taylor case
Posted on August 05, 2009The pro se guy won this case. The CAFC concluded:Because the district court should not have dismissed Mr. Taylor?s complaint, this court reverses. This court remands to the district court with instructions to enter judgment in accordance with this opinion...
CAFC works through many issues in Exergen case
Posted on August 05, 2009In Exergen, the CAFC reached many issues. For starters, a jury finding of non-anticipation was reversedand anticipation found.?To anticipate a claim, a single prior art reference must expressly or inherently disclose each claim limitation.? Finisar Corp...
Amazon sued by Cordance in D. Del.
Posted on August 05, 2009In a bit of irony, Amazon, who once sued Barnes & Noble in a now-legendary case, is in turn now being sued by Cordance in D. Delaware over US Patents 6,757,710; 6,088,717; and 5,862,325. Lynn H. Pasahow is on the case for Amazon.
Sun, Medimmune settle over amifostine (ETHYOL)
Posted on August 04, 2009Sun Pharmaceuticals has settled with Medimmune (Astra Zeneca ) concerning the (Hatch-Waxman) patent dispute over Ethyol (amifostine), a drug which is used to reduce toxicities associated with chemotherapy and radiation in head and neck cancers. Sun had filed a paragraph IV certification, and Medimmune had filed an infringement case in D...
Another chapter in TiVo versus EchoStar, and another chapter in bad reporting of patent matters
Posted on August 04, 2009In a post titled US Patent Office Initially Rules For Dish In TiVo Patent Case , Roger Cheng of the WSJ wrote:The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office initially ruled that TiVo's claims that EchoStar's technology workaround still violated its patents for pausing and rewinding live television was invalid...
"List of troubled agencies"
Posted on August 04, 2009An AP story of 4 Aug 09 titled Post office looks at changing hundreds of offices noted Just last week the Government Accountability Office [GAO] added the Postal Service to its list of troubled agencies, saying there are serious and significant structural financial challenges currently facing the agency...
Google/Apple tensions: Schmidt off Apple's Board
Posted on August 03, 2009Erick Schonfeld of TechCruch wrote on 3 Aug 09 of Google CEO Eric Schmidt resigning from the Apple Board:Google brought down the disapproving scrutiny of the FCC onto Apple on Friday night [July 31], and on Monday morning Schmidt resigned. It is difficult not to make a connection between these two events...
McNeil case: CAFC indicates BPAI misunderstood patent claim!
Posted on August 03, 2009The case IN RE MCNEIL-PPC, INC. is a review of re-examination by the CAFC, and addressesthe issue of "from what day" a response period is measured, date of decision vs. date of mailing.By a 2-1 vote, it was the latter, and McNeil won on the time issue, and then won on the substantivepatent issue...
Deja vu?
Posted on August 03, 2009Back during the oil crunches of the 1970's, the predictions made at the time were that oil would run out in the 2020's.Those predictions were discarded. Now, we have a prediction from Dr Fatih Birol, the chief economist at the International Energy Agency (IEA) that oil is running out far faster than previously predicted and that global production is likely to peak in about 10 years...
Self-plagiarism
Posted on August 02, 2009IPBiz has discussed self-plagiarism in a variety of contexts. A discussion of self-plagiarism from answers.com [below] does NOT cover the matter of Walter Wendler, who copied material he created while at Texas A&M into a proposal while he was employed at SIU...
The issue of copying sermons, re-visited
Posted on August 02, 2009In the post Online sermon databases raise questions about plagiarism, JEFF STRICKLER re-visits a topic previously covered on IPBiz [ eg, SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 19, 2006: Pastors who plagiarize with pride? and http://ipbiz.blogspot.com/2006/07/website-on-famous-plagiarists...
The patent world of iPS (stem cells): Yamanaka, Bayer, and iZumi
Posted on August 01, 2009Note to californiastemcellreport:A question a California taxpayer might ask is "how" has CIRM improved the life of average folks in California? You seem to say financing (ie spending money) and training are justifications. What is CIRM giving back? In defeating the stem cell bond proposal, people in New Jersey seemed to have figured out there weren't good answers...
BU grad student hit for $875K for illegal downloads
Posted on August 01, 2009In a case heard before a jury and presided over by U.S. District Judge Nancy Gertner in D Mass, Boston University grad student Joel Tenenbaum was ordered to pay $875,000 for illegal downloading. The student's attorney was Harvard Law School professor Charles Nesson...
Chester Carlson: the inventor did know best
Posted on August 01, 2009The "good news" about the TechDirt post titled Why Segway Failed To Reshape The World: Focused On Invention, Rather Than Innovation is that Mike Masnick sees that invention and innovation aren't the same thing.The "bad news" is seen in the following text:Recently, in talking about how the Netflix Prize helped demonstrate the value of openness and collaboration when it came to innovation, rather than hoarding and taking the "inventor-knows-best" attitude towards things, Mark Blafkin of the Association for Competitive Technology (a tech industry lobbying group who tends to be a patent system supporter) took exception to what we said about the value of openness and collaboration instead of focusing on patents, by noting that Dean Kamen has also put a lot of effort into collaboration and prizes to award innovation, but also is a strong believer in patents (and, actually, making them stronger)...
"Cash for clunkers" and the USPTO: both out of money?
Posted on July 31, 2009Back on July 24, IPBiz noted similarities between the USPTO and "Cash for Clunkers" in that both changed underlying data within an internet website. Now, 6 days after the program began, Cash for Clunkers ran out of money, not having foreseen adequately what was going to happen...
British science paper on "sperm from stem cells" retracted!
Posted on July 30, 2009On July 24, IPBiz posted on a paper from the group of Karim Nayernia, on the creation of human sperm from stem cells. Although IPBiz noted scientific peers had questioned some of the results, a commenter going under the name "Medical Information" asserted that this had been "proved...
"Green Goo", the movie?
Posted on July 30, 2009Remember the 1998 movie "A Civil Action" starring John Travolta as lawyer Jan Schlichtmann and Robert Duvall as the pragmatic attorney Facher?Note the news report on Rebecca Morlock who noticed what she calls "a green goo" seeping out of the ground below a former zinc-smelting plant in the town of Spelter...
Patent reformer morphs into patent troll?
Posted on July 29, 2009Bedrock Computer Technologies (owned by Dave Garrod) has sued Google, Yahoo, Amazon and others in ED Texas over US Patent 5,893,120.In discussing Dave Garrod's actions in initiating a lawsuit in ED Texas, Ryan Paul wrote: Another characteristic that makes this case unusual is the person behind it...
Kappos at the Senate on July 29
Posted on July 29, 2009William New, at Intellectual Property Watch, wrote of David Kappos before the Senate:But in the process, Kappos showed possible weaknesses in separating himself from his job at IBM and the need for international diplomacy on IP enforcement.Of nuts and bolts issues at the USPTO:Kappos said he has been asked by Commerce Secretary Gary Locke to ?refashion the patent examination process...
Technology Review speaks of 20,000 gal/(acre year) biofuel production
Posted on July 28, 2009Back in March 2009, IPBiz wrote:As noted by IPBiz, IAM used material in MIT's Technology Review to prop up Intellectual Ventures against a "troll smear" by Matt Asay. The IAM argument would seem to run: if it's discussed favorably by MIT Technology Review, it must be good technology, and thus IV has good technology in addition to whatever else it's doing...
Hedrick loses appeal on inventorship of stem cell patent
Posted on July 28, 2009The CAFC decision begins:Marc H. Hedrick, Prosper Benhaim, Hermann Peter Lorenz, and Min Zhu appeal the judgment of the United States District Court for the Central District of California finding that they were not co-inventors of U.S. Patent No. 6,777,231, and granting a misjoinder motion pursuant to 35 U...
Apotex takes its last swings against Plavix
Posted on July 28, 2009Peter Loftus at wsj in a post titled Apotex Asks US Supreme Court To Overturn Plavix Patent discusses the attempt of Apotex, through the vehicle of KSR, to attack the validity of claims of the Plavix patent through obviousness. The CAFC decision, discussed on IPBiz, was well post-KSR, so this appeal would involve convincing the Supreme Court that the CAFC was NOT practicing KSR the right way...
Reiffin loses (again) at CAFC over written description
Posted on July 28, 2009Back in the URochester v. Searle case, the CAFC, when looking for text to cite about "written description," reached back to the 2000 case Reiffen v. Microsoft:?[T]he purpose of the written description requirement is to ?ensure that the scope of the right to exclude, as set forth in the claims, does not overreach the scope of the inventor?s contribution to the field of art as described in the patent specification...
Quillen and Webster alive and well at Patently-O?
Posted on July 28, 2009One finds the text Most notably, around ten percent of the published applications will never issue and would not have been otherwise published. within the Patently-O post titled Published Applications as Prior Art in the larger text:In 2001, the USPTO published its first patent application...
Medtronic, Abbott settle patent litigation over stents
Posted on July 28, 2009Press release (MarketWatch) on July 27: Medtronic Inc. said Monday, July 27 that it has resolved all outstanding intellectual-property litigation with Abbott Laboratories As part of the agreement, Medtronic will pay $400 milion to Abbott and $42 million to evYsio Medical Devices LLC...
IAM on TechDirt post: "palpable nonsense"
Posted on July 27, 2009Joff Wild takes on TechDirt in the IAM post titled Techdirt plays fast and loose with the patent facts about India. See also:http://ipbiz.blogspot.com/2009/07/is-it-real-or-is-it-masnick.htmlhttp://ipbiz.blogspot.com/2009/06/mike-at-techdirt-returns...
"Substantial evidence" vs "sufficient credible evidence"
Posted on July 27, 2009In federal IP cases, one encounters the "substantial evidence" standard. Substantial evidence is relevant evidence that a reasonable mind might accept as adequate to support a conclusion. Note the discussion of "sufficient credible evidence" in a New Jersey criminal case, following on State v...
Searching the web for copied articles
Posted on July 27, 2009Although the title of the article is Start-up aims to make plagiarism profitable, the text is more along the line"start-up aims to make --being plagiarized-- profitable."The article by Clifford-Marsh states:Attributor's model is based on scanning web pages and identifying articles produced by participating publishers...
Capturing infringers in the 21st century
Posted on July 27, 2009IPBiz notes how quickly infringers/copyists can be snagged in the 21st century:Tweetmeme, an aggregator that finds popular content on Twitter, accused a still-unlaunched competitor called Retweet.com of copying its code verbatim. Although Retweet.com hasn?t yet opened to the public, Tweetmeme?s founder Nick Halstead discovered some code through a commenter, who left a link to his rival?s development environment on a review of the site over the weekend...
BlackBoard whacked by CAFC
Posted on July 27, 2009BlackBoard's case took a bad turn at the CAFC, as it continued to lose on claims 1-35 and additionally lost on claims 36-38.CampusTechnology wrote:Blackboard's patent on learning management system technologies has been overturned by the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit [CAFC]...
If Sessions can vote against Sotomayor, voting against patent reform is easy
Posted on July 27, 2009Senator Jeff Sessions concluded a piece in USAToday on the nomination of Judge Sotomayor with the text:I don't believe that Judge Sotomayor has the deep-rooted convictions necessary to resist the siren call of judicial activism. She has evoked its mantra too often...
Law Review on continuation application issue
Posted on July 27, 2009An article by Hedwig Murphy titled CURRENT ISSUES IN PUBLIC POLICY: LIMITING CONTINUATIONS: A PHARMACEUTICAL BASED PERSPECTIVE [6 Rutgers J.L. & Pub. Pol'y 856 ] contains the text:Accordingly, the statistics provided by the Patent Office "show a steadily growing inventory of unexamined patent applications that currently exceeds 900,000...
July 28, 1932: tanks deployed in Washington, DC
Posted on July 25, 2009An AP story, titled Report: Bush mulled sending troops into Buffalo, concerning proposed actions related to what would become the Lackawanna Six, concludes with the text:Scott L. Silliman, a Duke University law professor specializing in national security law, told the Times that a U...
Tuscaloosa News story mangles facts in Meehan plagiarism matter
Posted on July 25, 2009On July 25, Adam Jones of the Tuscaloosa News wrote about the Meehan plagiarism matter:JSU professor David Whetstone claims JSU President Bill Meehan, while a graduate student at UA in 1999, used large parts of Whetstone?s dissertation in work Meehan submitted as his own dissertation...
KCI wins "negative pressure" US re-exams
Posted on July 25, 2009A press release on July 24 from patent challenger Smith & Nephew indicates that Kinetic Concepts [KCI] has won a round in the US re-examination fight but suggests outcomes have been different in other jurisdictions (countries):Smith & Nephew Inc.'s Advanced Wound Management division announced that the United States Patent and Trademark Office (Patent Office) has issued actions in re-examination proceedings involving three of the negative pressure wound therapy (NPWT) patents licensed to Kinetic Concepts, Inc...
Cash for clunkers
Posted on July 24, 2009The relevant website is www.cars.gov, which reportedly crashed today. Somewhat reminds one of some performance at www.uspto.gov . To participate, one needs a registered, working 1984 (or newer) vehicle with combined mileage figures of 18 mpg (or less).
Teva, J&J settle over Tri-Cyclen
Posted on July 24, 2009Reuters quoted &J spokesman Greg Panico: "This settlement compensates us for loss caused by their [Teva's] at-risk launch and recognizes the patent is valid and enforceable," suggesting that Teva was folding the tent on this Hatch-Waxman case [but see below]...
Controversy surrounds research on "human sperm" from stem cells
Posted on July 24, 2009AP noted the publication by the research group of Karim Nayernia, of Newcastle University in the journal Stem Cells and Development on the topic of creating human sperm from embryonic stem cells but separately noted the work had been criticized by Allan Pacey, a senior lecturer in andrology at the University of Sheffield and Azim Surani, a professor of physiology and reproduction at the University of Cambridge...
"Microsoft's Five Fatal Flaws"
Posted on July 24, 2009The "five fatal flaws" refer to problems ("fatal flaws") in the decision by the CFI [the European Court of First Instance] in the Microsoft case. In a law review article titled "Microsoft's Five Fatal Flaws" [ Alan Devlin and Michael Jacobs, 2009 COLUM...
"Ending Abuse..." being re-invented?
Posted on July 24, 2009Elizabeth Pesses in the article PATENT AND CONTRIBUTION: BRINGING THE QUID PRO QUO INTO EBAY V. MERCEXCHANGE [ 11 Yale J. L. & Tech. 309] wrote of "Ending Abuse...": Id. For various legal scholarship attempting to calculate better sized patent terms, see Mark A...
The myth of the first-mover advantage
Posted on July 24, 2009Embedded within a story about Predator UAVs is the text:For his part, Singer draws another historical parallel, comparing the U.S. and the UAV to the British invention of the tank in the early 20th century."There is no such thing as a permanent first maneuver advantage," Singer says...
Are people who lose jobs history?
Posted on July 23, 2009Back in June 2004, LBE noted the following text:Other labor statistics appear to support the bleaklong-term outlook for professionals. U.S. Departmentof Labor unemployment figures for 2000-2003 show a 95percent increase in unemployment among workers withcollege degrees, compared to a 40 percent increaseamong those with a high school diploma or less...
Churchill trying to regain CU job
Posted on July 23, 2009Ward Churchill didn't get his job back at CU and is asking for re-consideration. Examiner.com:Ward Churchill's lawyer, David Lane, filed a motion 22 July 09 asking Denver District Judge Larry Naves to amend his ruling and reinstate Churchill to his former position as a tenured professor at CU's Boulder campus...
The Chinese/Taiwanese companies who make Apple products
Posted on July 23, 2009In PSC v. Foxconn (2004), the CAFC re-visited the "disclosed, not claimed --> public domain" holding of Johnson & Johnston:PSC?s disclosure that the prior art included clips with plastic parts was both precise and clear. One important purpose of the written description is to provide notice to the public as to the subject matter of the patent, while the claim provides notice as to the scope of the invention...
History detectives on patents
Posted on July 23, 2009Note US patent 251,231 to Thomas Howell for an exploding device to discourage grave robbers. ["Grave Torpedo"]
Park vents on NASA, twice?
Posted on July 23, 2009IPBiz was wondering what Bob Park would say about some of things coming from NASA and from former astronauts. Park's post of July 17 had a predictable message, but seemed oddly unedited (or tediously repetitive):This is the 21st century. Telerobots have been invented...
"it feels better to reject than to allow, simply because it's more conclusive"
Posted on July 23, 2009Just-n-Examiner has the line: The truth of the matter, though, for me, is that it feels better to reject than to allow, simply because it's more conclusive.andMaking the decision to allow an application, though, is somewhat less conclusive. Sure, once I've done a thorough search and satisfied myself that I've found the best prior art available, I'm not reluctant to allow an application (OPQA be damned!)Still, who knows what unavailable prior art might be out there? Some hardcopy of a journal that is sitting in some school's technical library in Boise? Perhaps an advertisement in a newspaper on microfiche in Berlin?andObviously, you have to stop searching sometime...
Plagiarism Thursday in Minnesota
Posted on July 23, 2009A line from "citypages":One day you're hitting Ctrl+C then Ctrl+V into blog software, the next someone's making an unflattering movie about you called Shattered Glass and you're being played by Darth Vader.neglected to addOR you could be Vice-President of the United States, President of a major Illinois university, or a University Professor at Harvard...
Kappos, IBM options, and the hearing for 29 July 09
Posted on July 23, 2009The TechDailyDose reported:Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy has released the committee's completed questionnaire pertaining to David Kappos, President Obama's pick for Patent and Trademark Office director, which could signal that his confirmation hearing is around the corner...
New Jersey--July 23, 2009. FBI nabs NJ mayors.
Posted on July 23, 2009The NYT reports: The mayors of Hoboken and Secaucus, a state assemblyman and dozens of others were rounded up early Thursday [July 23, 2009] as the F.B.I. swept across four counties in New Jersey as part of a two-year corruption and money-laundering investigation that ranged from the Jersey Shore to Brooklyn and has even reached into the State House in Trenton...
WSJ on problems at the USPTO and Kappos nomination
Posted on July 22, 2009Note the article by Amy Schatz at WSJ titled: Backlog, Budget Woes Await Patent Chief. The second paragraph states:Many companies are complaining that the patent office is approving too many weak patent applications, issuing patents on less-than-novel ideas or inventions that belong to another party...
Will 2009 fee for patent practitioners be collected by USPTO in 2009?
Posted on July 22, 2009IPBiz has had previous posts on the planned fee for registered patent practitioners authorized under § 11.8(d) [seePatent attorney fee won't be collected till Spring 2009 ] Patently-O has a post including the text:The Office has not issued a notice to pay the annual practitioner maintenance fee for FY2009...
Is it real or is it Masnick?
Posted on July 21, 2009On July 18, IPBiz, in the post On guys who know things: Einstein was a patent clerk, sort of... reproduced some text of Ryan Scott's post The Rise Of Techno-Cheating & Fall Of Memorization and made some comparisons to Mike Masnick/Techdirt on the topic of collaboration/re-imagination...
"If the plaintiffs in this case have standing, then ..."
Posted on July 21, 2009The University of Utah and Myriad have moved to dismiss the suit brought by ACLU, PubPat, and others involving patents directed to BRCA. [See IPBiz post: ACLU sues the US patent office ].Text in the motion to dismiss: "If the plaintiffs in this case have standing, then virtually anyone can challenge any patent at any time...
Shane report questions need for oppositions (PGR)
Posted on July 20, 2009Within the conclusion:This report outlined several adverse effects likely to result from the expansion of administrative patent challenges. It showed that the changes would increase the length of patent pendency, create uncertainty about patent validity, decrease the knowledge disclosure necessary for innovation, increase the costs of achieving patent validation, reduce investment in R&D, hinder efforts of U...
Jerry Lewis and patents on video assist
Posted on July 20, 2009In a post titled Video assist: The true history, Peter Glaskowsky assesses claims by Jerry Lewis about invention of video assist, which relates to the use of electronic video technology to support film making.One has the line: Jim Songer didn't apply for patents on this work, which would have belonged to Video West in any event...
USPTO hiring freeze: lifted in 2001 but what about 2009?
Posted on July 19, 2009IPBiz notes that on July 19 someone in the vicinity of Arlington, VA [66.171.212.# (VERIZON AVENUE) ] did a search -- us patent and trademark office hiring freeze lifted -- The first hits obtained pertained to events that happened in the year 2001:Oversight Hearing on the United States Patent and Trademark Office dated June 7, 2001U...
Self-plagiarizing law prof snagged
Posted on July 19, 2009In the time prior to Poshard's plagiarism at SIU, one had the matter of Walter Wendler, who self-plagiarized (copied his own earlier stuff without attribution) but who defended himself by saying "one cannot plagiarise oneself." Now, in South Korea we have the Hyun Byung-chul matter...
On guys who know things: Einstein was a patent clerk, sort of...
Posted on July 18, 2009In an article titled The Rise Of Techno-Cheating & Fall Of Memorization [which contained survey results on how teens cheat at school using cell phones], there was an interesting COMMENT:In NO industry is collaboration considered cheating. Only in SCHOOL is this a problem...
Teleflex loses in patent case against Spire
Posted on July 18, 2009In a July 10 ruling by U.S. District Judge Douglas Woodlock of D Mass, claims of a patent to Teleflex, in the area of catheters used in hemodialysis, were found invalid.
Cronkite
Posted on July 18, 2009In a NY Times article Cronkite?s Signature: Approachable Authority, one had the text:When Mr. Cronkite was No. 1, the nightly news mattered. College students nowadays get their information from blogs and Comedy Central, not CBS. Families don?t gather in the den to eat dinner in front of ?World News Tonight With Charles Gibson...
Patent pendency
Posted on July 18, 2009On July 17, 2009, Patently-O discussed results on a database of 20,000+ randomly selected patent applications and issued patents filed 2000 - 2007. For each of case, [Dennis] tallied the final status as of mid-July 2009. (Status is either patented, abandoned, or pending)...
"What if" Ohio University were in China?
Posted on July 16, 2009In the past, IPBiz covered the Ohio University plagiarism business, which largely involved copying without attribution, by MS students, of background material into their theses.A story in the Shanghai Daily on July 16 begins:A top university official has had his PhD qualification and postgraduate tutorship revoked after an investigation confirmed he plagiarized his doctoral thesis...
The patent assets of a company in market failure
Posted on July 16, 2009A post titled Patent Perishables at ipeg goes into "what happens to IP" when a company faces bankruptcy, illustrating with the company Qimonda AG, Germany?s DRAM made as (sort of) an example. Some colorful text:A large chunk of patents, no doubt as your main intangibles assets...
Do statins cause transient global amnesia?
Posted on July 15, 2009Within a report titled Are Clinical Trial Results Compromised By Money? at the denvernewschannel, one finds the text:After astronaut and flight surgeon Duane Graveline's cholesterol went up from 230 to 270, NASA doctors put him on Lipitor. But an under-reported side effect changed his life...
IBM loses to Asus at ITC
Posted on July 14, 2009PC World reported: The U.S. International Trade Commission on 13 July 2009 rejected an IBM request to review a decision that denied the company's attempts to block the import of hardware made by Asustek on patent infringement grounds.IBM in January of last year filed a patent infringement complaint with the ITC, alleging that Asus was importing and selling infringing products in the U...
IBM asserting its invulnerability to Bilski?
Posted on July 14, 2009Back in March 2009, IPBiz noted that IBM, caught with its hand in the business method cookie jar, quickly retracted a business method application:In the flap that followed IBM's patent application on outsourcing methods (20090083107), IBM spokesman Steve Malkiewicz said Monday, 30 March 09 the application would be withdrawn because it "is contrary to our patent policy on business methods...
Korean comments on plagiarism
Posted on July 14, 2009Kim Tae-ick at Chosun Ilbo began a column on plagiarism with the words:The word "plagiarism" comes from a Latin for "kidnapper." The derivation obviously equates the theft of other people's intellectual properties with kidnapping their ideas.This text confuses plagiarism (copying without attribution) with intellectual property (copyright infringement: reproducing copyrighted material without permission)...
Mosaid goes after IBM over DRAM
Posted on July 14, 2009DowJones reported:MOSAID Technologies Inc. filed a patent infringement lawsuit [on 13 July 09] against International Business Machines Corp. , after claiming it was unable to reach a settlement with the tech giant after many years of negotiation.The Canadian patent licensing and intellectual property development company said IBM had infringed on six of its U...
Warren, NJ
Posted on July 13, 2009Warren, NJ placed number 6 on CNN Money's "best places to live":Children, commuters, cul-de-sacs--sure, Warren has those. But it isn't the typical big-city suburb. Here, fields aren't used just to kick soccer balls but also to raise cows and crops, thanks to 72 working farms...
Patent pool on RNAi as to NTD?
Posted on July 12, 2009Chris Reidy of the Boston Globe wrote that that Alnylam will contribute more than 1,500 issued or pending patents on its RNA interference (RNAi) technology patent estate to the patent pool established by GSK earlier this year for neglected tropical diseases (NTD).
"Guilty of misleading the American public"?
Posted on July 12, 2009The text "guilty of misleading the American public" was at issue in the Lanham Act case Groden v. Random House, 35 USPQ2d 1547. IPBiz was reminded of this text when reading an account by Dan Wetzel of the recent Brock Lesnar incident in the UFC:And so that was the excuse...
"Patent quality index"?
Posted on July 12, 2009Alison Frankel, in a post titled IP Litigators, Meet Your PTO Nominee, David Kappos of IBM , refers to the Foley webinar including Dave Kappos and writes:But we were most intrigued by Kappos's vision of an automated "patent quality index." As he explained it in the Foley webcast, the index would be created with data on the effectiveness, in terms of patent awards and court-determined validity, of various patent applications...
Do inventive companies fear patent trolls?
Posted on July 12, 2009An article in The Economist titled Red tape and scissors includes text?Patent trolls? pose another problem. These are firms that buy up patents, not to turn them into products but solely to sue other firms that may have infringed them. Since the United States Patent Office grants patents freely and courts enforce them zealously, every inventive company lives in fear of trolls...
Scope of appellate review limited only by common sense?
Posted on July 11, 2009IN RE POD-NERS, L.L.C., an appeal of a re-exam result to the CAFC, is another case in which obviousness and KSR are mentioned.The reasoning for obviousness was not so clear at the lower level, but the CAFC wrote:In ruling that the claims would have been obvious, the Board did not explain its conclusion in detail...
Social security doomsday already coming true at USPTO?
Posted on July 11, 2009On 7 July 2009, a bill passed the House to allow the USPTO to use money statutorily limited to its trademark side to pay for patent-related work. This money would have to re-paid by 2014, and the USPTO is authorized to establish a surcharge to re-pay the funds...
Bland blogs best?
Posted on July 10, 2009In a post related to Galen Suppes of the University of Missouri [UM], PatentHawk (aka Gary Odom) writes:UM also forces Professor Crouch to write his blog entries using only the most bland language, and flogs Crouch to slave night and day over a hot Excel spreadsheet in preparation of marginally meaningful charts and graphs...
Fraser case: no fishing expedition in fish product preparation case
Posted on July 09, 2009Within a diverse opinion in the FRASER case on a patent claim for a method of preparing a fish product, one finds an allusion to FRCP 56(f):Nor does this court find that the trial court ?deprived Appellants of the opportunity to have discovery.? Appellants? Br...
Google software for netbooks, a subsidized pricing model?
Posted on July 09, 2009Related to an earlier post on IPBiz [ Google v. Microsoft: Android/Windows, Google/Bing ], Peter Glaskowsky has an article Google's Chrome OS strategy explained which notes: Linux may be free, but Google can undercut that price if it's willing to cut OEMs in on its ad revenue...
Pequignot loses patent marking case against Solo Cups
Posted on July 09, 2009The case by attorney Matthew Pequignot against Solo Cups over patent marking went against Pequignot in ED Va.See earlier IPBiz post: Qui tam suit over patent marking on Solo cups
Star-Ledger on Vivian Sanks King
Posted on July 09, 2009In the UMDNJ fraud saga, Josh Margolin wrote in July 2009 about a document from June 10, 2008 which indicated that Vivian Sanks King [former general counsel of UMDNJ) would not be prosecuted.Margolin included Christie's take on the matter:"As general counsel, Ms...
Mullin's "Prior Art" blog tries to smoke Ebert
Posted on July 09, 2009On July 8, Joe Mullin, in an article titled Good Magazine Goes Bad: The Ethics of Patent Trolling leveled criticism against an article in "Good Magazine" on Erich Spangenberg, described by Mullin as one of the most successful "patent trolls."The Mullin article does not name the author of the Good Magazine piece, but does state:I know the writer was aware of my blog ["The Prior Art", TPA], and TPA posts alone could have provided her with plenty of leads to the litigation record, including the Wisconsin opinion where Spangenberg was found shuffling his patents around to repeatedly sue the same defendants, and where a judge found Spangenberg had engaged in witness tampering (that case is noted in the comments of the Good story, which are universally negative...
The "patent control policy" of World War II and US 2,852,687
Posted on July 06, 2009The PBS show "History Detectives" had an episode relevant to patents which aired in the NJ area on 5 July 09. The patent in question was US 2,852,687 titled Isotope separating apparatus. which issued to Michael K. Kudravetz and Harold B. Greene on September 16, 1958...
Martin in IDEA on "first to invent"/"first to file"
Posted on July 06, 2009In a July 5 post titled Patent Americana , PatentHawk (aka Gary Odom) extracts material from a law review article by Michael Martin, sometimes a contributor to the blog.The law review article, titled THE END OF THE FIRST-TO-INVENT RULE: A CONCISE HISTORY OF ITS ORIGIN, 49 IDEA 435 (2009), has a "conclusion" which states:Along with a summary of the history, I have argued in this article thatthe federalist structure of government in 1791?in particular, the dual sovereigntyof states and federal government?presented a practical obstacle thatprevented the patent board from adopting a first-to-file rule of priority...
Max Planck GmbH goes after MIT, Whitehead, UMass
Posted on July 05, 2009In an article titled Biting hands that feed , Steven Syre of the Boston Globe writes on a patent rights/patent prosecution dispute among Max Planck GmbH and Alnylam Pharmaceuticals Inc. on one side and MIT, the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, and the University of Massachusetts, on the other side...
Microsoft and Google's Android
Posted on July 05, 2009Back in 2007, Ed Burnette was addressing whether Microsoft loved or hated Google's Android. In that context, he got into the concept of a "fork," which is relevant to IP discussions:Furthermore, Android does not have a line of code in common with Sun?s Java ME...
Sarcasm or stupidity?
Posted on July 05, 2009In a post on Kappos, ManagingIP repeats text from a COMMENT on the 271Blog, which separately had appeared on IPBiz:I've been managed by Dave Kappos during 6 years : he is brilliant, even absolutely amazing, always kind with his team, open to discussions, and a great manager...
Cartoons on science themes
Posted on July 05, 2009Vadlo cartoons:**on negative datahttp://vadlo.com/cartoons.php?id=36**on perpetual post-docs:http://vadlo.com/cartoons.php?id=43**on the journal Naturehttp://vadlo.com/cartoons.php?id=64**on publishing bad articles in stem cell researchhttp://vadlo.com/cartoons...
"What wrong did Enron or Madoff do?"
Posted on July 05, 2009Refer to livemint.com, with the following text:"They promised payback in this lifetime", says the British Nobel laureate Sir Harold Kroto, with a pun on the way humans are destroying the planet with blatant disregard for future generations.IPBiz notes that Sir Harold told us buckyballs were major components of soot.
Apple's non-user-replaceable batteries
Posted on July 05, 2009As most iPhone users know, the battery within the iPhone is non-user-replaceable. When the battery goes, your iPhone is gone. Separately, currently, battery problems are causing discoloration on the white model iPhone 3GS. A recently published patent application [SYSTEMS AND METHODS FOR MONITORING AND RESPONDING TO FORCES INFLUENCING A BATTERY, 20090169977 based on 12/242898]suggests Apple is aware of some of the difficulties...
TG Daily on plasma patents, single molecule transistors
Posted on July 05, 2009LG Electronics and Hitachi have settled their disputes in the plasma display area.TG Daily concludes its report with the text:There are so many patent battles going on between Japanese and South Korean companies that it's hard to keep up. They nearly always result in cross licensing and a secret deal...
UIowa takes a whack at Abbott/Humira
Posted on July 04, 2009The UI [University of Iowa] Research Foundation is going after Abbott Labs for alledged infringement in the context of Humira of patents to UI microbiology Professor Mark Stinski related to CMV Promoter. Abbott already took a beating from J&J in the Humira area over patents originating at New York University exclusively licensed to Centocor Ortho Biotech.
"Peer review within science journalism"?
Posted on July 04, 2009A post by Steven Krivit at New Energy Times titled Peer Review From Science Fans was critical of Charles Petit at the Knight Science Journalism Tracker:Petit is the "lead tracker" for the Knight Science Journalism Tracker, an MIT program that performs "peer review within science journalism...
Alabama punts in Meehan matter
Posted on July 03, 2009More discussion of the Meehan plagiarism matter in Alabama, from the Crimson White:?The University is aware of and has looked into the situation,? said Cathy Andreen, director of media relations. ?Under the circumstances, we are not inclined to go behind the decision the dissertation committee made 10 years ago to approve the dissertation...
Apple's tactile feeback
Posted on July 03, 2009Apple's published patent application 20090167704, titled Multi-touch display screen with localized tactile feedback, has a first claim:A method for enabling non-visual use of an electronic device, comprising:presenting a visual display, wherein the visual display includes a virtual button;associating a haptic feedback response with the virtual button; andproviding the haptic feedback response enabling a user to feel the location of the virtual button...
Old Navy and the $1 US flag tee shirts
Posted on July 03, 2009A number of websites were talking about Old Navy selling US flag tee shirts on July 3, 2009 for $1.00.Dropped by the store in Watchung, New Jersey and was told that this sale was only going on in Canada (which does celebrate "Canada Day" on July 1, presumably without US flags and likely not interested in flag tees 2 days after Canada Day)...
Rahm Emanual reprised?
Posted on July 02, 2009In January 2009, IPBiz included a picture of Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanual:In June 2009, LBE thought he saw Mr. Emanual on the way to CN Tower in Toronto:
Straight faces, winners, and losers
Posted on July 02, 2009IPBiz found the following from yahoo finance (via Fortune) of interest:Following a speech at Peking University on his first trip to China as Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner was asked to share his thoughts about the safety of Chinese investments in the United States...
See no evil?
Posted on July 01, 2009A piece from "The Huntsville Item" from 20 Dec 2007 states:The Huntsville Item will move into the new year continuing its efforts for quality local news with Dennis Garrison as publisher.Garrison will assume his new role effective today.In June 2009, about one and a half years later, Editor & Publisher noted that :an article ran in The Huntsville (Texas) Item on June 25, that is almost identical, word for word, to an article earlier initiated by the Financial Planning Association...
Abbott loses big time to J&J over Humira
Posted on July 01, 2009After five hours of deliberations on June 29, an ED Texas jury found Abbott?s actions in selling Humira, in view of J&J's patent position, to be willful and determined J&J is owed $1.17 billion in lost profits and $504 million in royalties. Abbott plans to appeal the verdict, which is the largest in US history...
In passing
Posted on July 01, 2009IPBiz had its 5 year anniversary on June 29, putting up 5,041 posts in that time period.Blogging from Toronto at SSI-17 for post 5042.
SSI-17
Posted on June 27, 2009INTERCALATION COMPOUNDS, BATTERIES, AND PATENTS:WHAT HAPPENS AFTER GRAD SCHOOLI. Graphite/Chromium trioxideA. BackgroundOur first publication showed that grahite/chromium trioxide prepared by the Croft method was NOT an intercalation compound of graphite but rather a physical mixture of graphite and Cr3O8...
UAlabama system tightens its IP policy
Posted on June 26, 2009In a sign of the times, the University of Alabama system has altered its IP policy to make it more "pro-university." The Birmingham Biz Journal reports:The system amended its patent policy on June 19 to explicitly claim ownership of all inventions produced using its resources on its three campuses...
Caltech, Sony settle patent case on digital cameras
Posted on June 26, 2009Bloomberg reports: CalTech sued six digital-camera companies, including Canon Inc. and Nikon Corp., seeking royalties on 11 patents related to digital-camera technology. Some of the inventions relate to pixel sensors that improve electronically transmitted images and came from research CalTech did for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, according to information on the patents...
Glaxo loses to Teva on Seretide in Ireland
Posted on June 26, 2009Reuters notes: The ruling from the Commercial Court in Dublin is a victory for Teva Pharmaceutical Industries, whose Ivax unit had challenged the combination patent for Seretide (Advair in the US). The patent relates to the combination of the active ingredients salmeterol and fluticasone propionate, and expires in 2013...
Samsung prevails against Sharp in ITC case
Posted on June 26, 2009The Los Angeles Times noted:In a notice posted on its Web site today, the ITC said unlicensed Sharp LCD devices, including display panels and modules, and LCD televisions made overseas that use Samsung's patented invention should be banned from the U...
Good and bad patents: ask Bob Dylan
Posted on June 26, 2009The 271Blog covered a session on NPEs at the IAM IP Business Congress and noted:It was a very engaging session, which left some serious questions needing answers. Specifically, the public perception of NPE's has currently been couched in terms of "bad" patents being asserted to extract "illegitimate" licensing fees...
Obviousness sinks pro se appellant at CAFC
Posted on June 25, 2009In the Mettke case, KSR comes up to favor the appellant, who loses anyway:Mr. Mettke is correct that the selective hindsight combination of references that show various elements of the claim generally does not suffice to establish obviousness. See KSR Int?l Co...
The concept of "write-through"
Posted on June 25, 2009A story in the LA Times discusses plagiarism charges leveled against Chris Anderson and mentions the concept of "write-through" :On Tuesday [June 23] afternoon, Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired magazine and author of the 2006 bestseller "The Long Tail," received an e-mail warning that his new book, "Free: The Future of a Radical Price," was to be challenged...
Post-grant oppositions: another pothole in the road for patent reform?
Posted on June 23, 2009On June 22, the 271Blog posted on the IAM-sponsored meeting in Chicago-->Today, IAM kicked off the IP Business Congress at the Four Seasons Hotel in Chicago. This morning?s sessions were quite packed, with an estimated 370+ people from various sectors of technology gathering to talk about IP valuation, prosecution and enforcementOf US matters-->Speaker: Todd Dickinson, Executive Director AIPLA...
Kappos and IBM in May 2009
Posted on June 22, 2009On May 8, 2009 Foley hosted a webinar in its Patent Nation Web Conference series titled, "IP Outlook in the Reform Era." The participants included Foley & Lardner attorneys Jonathan Spivey, Jon Dudas, Courtenay Brinckerhoff, and Sharon Barner, along with IBM's David Kappos, now indicated to be the nominee of Barack Obama for undersecretary at Commerce and Director of the USPTO...
Patents: the Polynesians, Woody Brown, and Hobie Alter
Posted on June 21, 2009The wikipedia entry for Woody Brown contains the following:After the war [World War II], Brown served as a US government surveyor on Christmas Island. There he was fascinated by the speed of the Polynesian natives' twin-hulled outrigger canoes. Back in Hawaii he adapted the idea, using lightweight hulls and adding huge sails, and in 1947 built the Manu Kai ("Sea Bird"), probably the fastest sailing boat in the world at the time and now seen as the first modern, ocean-going catamaran...
Canada's CBC: "Plagiarism did occur, and it wasn?t detected"
Posted on June 21, 2009IPBiz covered plagiarism issues in a flap over a report on copyright by the Conference Board of Canada in an earlier post.[ see The Great Canadian Cut-and-Paste Caper]. What is refreshing to see is, that in the aftermath, the people in Canada tackled the issue head-on, rather than inventing some sophomoric concept like "inadvertent plagiarism" to cover their tracks...
Why is news coverage of patent reform so bad?
Posted on June 21, 2009Ever wonder why news coverage of patent reform is so bad?Back in April 2009, Joff Wild at IAM wrote, in the context of press coverage of IP:So having said that, it is also important to stress that journalists can only learn if they are taught. If a story breaks at, say, 1...
Empathy: do lawyers have it?
Posted on June 20, 2009The word "empathy" appears several times in previous IPBiz posts. However, IPBiz got a chuckle from a post on InsideCounsel titled Maximizing Conference Experience: You Got the Interview! Now What? which included:Please resist the urge to say ?hire me,? or any variation thereof, as a solution to the target?s challenges...
Kappos, Lemley, Merritt, and the 271Blog
Posted on June 20, 2009Back in April 2008, IPBiz noted the problematic nature of Professor Lemley receiving funds from the IT industry for research for his paper in 85 Tex. L. Rev. 1991 (2007). The April 2 IPBiz post is titled Industry contracting with academics to advance their message? IPBiz notes that the fact of Lemley's IT support was observed in comments to a blog post on the 271Blog which appeared in August 2008: Patent Reform Crawling Back In 2008? Lemley Proposal For Damages May Provide AnswersThe content of the actual POST on the 271Blog was favorable to Professor Lemley: A recent paper by professor Mark Lemley suggests that easing restrictions on "lost profits" damages may provide a better means for market competitors to recoup damages, while reducing tendencies of courts to provide "kickers" on reasonable royalties...
It's Kappos
Posted on June 19, 2009White House press release on June 18:WASHINGTON, DC ? Today, President Barack Obama announced his intent to nominate the following individuals for key administration posts: David J. Kappos, Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office and Warren F...
"This blatant rip-off is unacceptable, even for a blogger."
Posted on June 19, 2009Within the text of a post by Richard Connelly titled: Plagiarism? Or Great Minds Thinking Alike? A Lunatic Rant Inspires Controversy, one has the words:This blatant rip-off is unacceptable, even for a blogger.Connelly, on inspecting the facts, concludes: But no plagiarism was involved...
Burning water, before Kanzius
Posted on June 19, 2009John Kanzius, in his work on a method of cancer treatment, found that he could burn salt water.[See What Wikipedia didn't tell you about Kanzius?: Of the "burning water" discovery of John Kanzius, Wikipedia writes: "The details of the process are still unreleased while Kanzius applies for a patent...
Mendte goes after Philly Inquirer
Posted on June 18, 2009With his house arrest ending on Monday, June 1, former Philly channel 3 (KYW) news anchor Larry Mendte filed a lawsuit on June 3 against three columnists for The Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News newspapers, as well as the papers' parent company, Philadelphia Media Holdings, alleging defamation and false light...
Invalidity via 112 P1 overturned because of improper claim construction
Posted on June 18, 2009In Cartner v. Alamo, a finding that claims 5 and 12 of the ?284 patent are invalid for failure to meet the written description requirement of 35 U.S.C. § 112 was reversed on the basis ofimproper claim construction by the district court.Of the use of the prosecution history in claim construction:Of particular importance to the proper claim construction in this case is the prosecution history of the ?284 patent...
The McZeal case: the CAFC can't get no respect
Posted on June 18, 2009Within the MCZEAL v. SPRINT case, the CAFC discusses a district court's treatment of an earlier CAFC ruling:The district court discussed our decision to vacate and remand this case, stating at oral argument on December 4, 2007: ?I?m actually comfortable simply holding the same way I held last time?; ??Their writ,? to quote a 1920s lawyer, does not run to the rational faculties?; and ?this is absurd...
Supreme Court: 5-4 vote in Osborne DNA case
Posted on June 18, 2009Facts surrounding the Osborne case on the right to DNA testing revealed an odd combination of states that do NOT allow access:"To suddenly constitutionalize this area would short-circuit what looks to be a prompt and considered legislative response," Roberts said...
Business method patents thriving post-Bilski?
Posted on June 18, 2009Aaron R. Feigelson gives US 7,546,945 (System and method for managing transactions, notice of allowance mailed 11 Feb. 09) as the purest example of a Bilski miss. Keep in mind, Aaron is talking about the NON-USE of Bilski against business method patents: I've commented before that it is not too difficult to find cases of Bilski failures by examiners, and frankly, discussing such patents is losing its novelty...
Star Scientific smoked by Reynolds: patents invalid, not infringed
Posted on June 18, 2009In the latest development in the Star Scientific v. Reynolds saga, a Baltimore jury found the claims of the Star Scientific patents invalid, and, separately, not infringed by Reynolds.The Wall Street Journal wrote: A federal jury ruled Tuesday [16 June 2009] for R...
Stanford Ph.D. student sues Stanford, Stanford prof over patents and copying thesis
Posted on June 17, 2009As noted by IPBiz earlier in June, the CAFC in Larson v. Correct Craft talked a great deal about Chou v. University of Chicago, 254 F.3d 1347, 1358 (Fed. Cir. 2001) and noted that neither the Chou nor Larson case decided whether a purely reputational interest is sufficient to confer standing for a § 256 claim...
ICAP buys transactions division of Ocean Tomo
Posted on June 16, 2009See Reuters:ICAP, the world's biggest interdealer broker, on 16 June 09 announced that it has bought the transactions division of patent brokerage Ocean Tomo for $10 million in cash and shares.A garage sale of deck chairs on the Titanic?See alsohttp://ipbiz...
Crovitz on the loose again, parroting Bessen/Meurer
Posted on June 16, 2009PatentHawk went after Gordon Crovitz (again), although not by name, in criticizing Crovitz' piece: Why Technologists Want Fewer Patents , which piece concludes:The Supreme Court may decide that more progress would be made with narrower definitions of what is patentable...
Richardson of Uniloc on invention
Posted on June 15, 2009Further on the Uniloc case, Frederick Bailier Richardson III (Ric Richardson) is quoted in watoday:"Once you do something that you think is obvious and then realise that not only is it not obvious, but that people think you are making it up, you realise that you can do anything...
Patent reform: the house that lemmings built?
Posted on June 15, 2009Whenever IPBiz sees a reference to lemmings, visions of IP law profs come to mind AND of course the great Disney hoax.Within an article about Bryce Harper:The problem I do have with it, though, is that there are no doubt thousands of delusional parents who will see this news and think that maybe it's a viable path for their nowhere-near-as-talented sons and daughters...
Park notes favorable citation by Eugenie Reich in WSJ
Posted on June 14, 2009Bob Park's 12 June 09 WN included:In the Wall Street Journal, June 6, 2009, Eugenie Reich discussed "the five best books on scientific fraud," including my "Voodoo Science" (Oxford, 2000), which she referred to as "devastating" on the subject of "cold fusion...
On blogging dynamics and blog sources
Posted on June 14, 2009Intertwined with a recent story on the BPAI was a story about sources for blogs and decisions to use those sources.**May 21 post on IPWatchDog Is the Patent Office Really Muzzling Dissent?Today I read on Patently O that the Board of Patent Appeals and Interfences is shutting down dissent in favor of efficiency...
NLJ story on impact of TS Tech on ED Tx patent litigations
Posted on June 14, 2009See More Defendants Seek to Blast out of Patent 'Rocket Docket' -->Lawyers say the May 22 decision in In re Genentech Inc. enhances the power of a Dec. 29 decision in a In re TS Tech USA Corp. because both decisions say the Eastern District of Texas abused its discretion by denying the defendants' transfer motion...
Big company abuse of the patent system?
Posted on June 14, 2009An IAM blog post titled ACT calls on CAFC to rein in big company abuse of the patent system beginsPatent litigation is expensive.then goes toStrangely enough, while many big companies rail against patent trolls and the harm they are doing, very few seem to be as concerned about how litigation favours them in so many waysthen gets to the title text:With all that in mind, I was very interested to receive an email late yesterday afternoon from the Association for Competitive Technology [ACT] about an amicus brief it has filed in the TiVo v EchoStar case...
Satire: "Matt Groening Sues Obama For Plagiarism"
Posted on June 12, 2009See IMAO for full post, which ends:For his part, Obama denied that any plagiarism took place, saying, ?Homer and I do trade ideas all the time, and you know he?s occasionally used lines of mine. Like that thing where he says ?Why you little!?? and starts strangling Bart? He TOTALLY got that from watching me & Biden...
Judge tosses Guardian's claims against Nintendo
Posted on June 12, 2009AP notes: An order from U.S. District Court Judge Manuel Real in Los Angeles dismissing Guardian's claims comes less than six months after the lawsuit by Guardian Media Technologies Ltd. was filed.Bloomberg gave further details:?Nintendo vigorously defends patent lawsuits,? Rick Flamm, Nintendo of America?s general counsel, said in a statement...
Stem cell flap over US 7,217,565?
Posted on June 12, 2009Back in April 2009, IPBiz noted an anti-patent diatribe which appeared on californiastemcellreport. [http://ipbiz.blogspot.com/2009/04/anti-patent-diatribe-on.html ]The initial californiastemcellreport post noted:[John M. Simpson] reported that Philip Schwartz, head of the Resource, said his organization's efforts to promote research with human neural stem cells has been effectively blocked by patents held by Stem Cells Inc ["SCI"]...
Lithium batteries for cars
Posted on June 12, 2009GreenTech Media discussed recent events in lithium batteries:Valence Technology, the Austin, Texas-based lithium iron magnesium phosphate battery maker, announced Tuesday 2 June 09 a partnership with German industrial giant Siemens to supply batteries for hybrid boats...
"Trolls on top?" or how not to cite relevant work?
Posted on June 12, 2009In footnote 22 of the SSRN article titled Extreme Value or Trolls on Top? Evidence from the Most Litigated Patents by Allison, Lemley, and Walker, one has a reference to Mark A. Lemley & Nathan Myhrvold, The Complex Ecology of Patent Plaintiffs (working paper 2009)...
Buying intellectual property at bargain prices?
Posted on June 10, 2009Dan Haugen at MinnPost wrote of an IP acquistion by St. Jude:St. Jude Medical has picked up some bargain-bin intellectual property from a liquidating Seattle neuromodulation company.Northstar Neuroscience had been developing a nonsurgical brain-stimulation treatment to help stroke survivors regain hand and arm functions...
Palin "plagiarism" incident
Posted on June 09, 2009A story making the rounds is an allegation that Governor Palin "plagiarized" text from Newt Gingrich concerning Ronald Reagan in making a speech. From Politico:On Saturday [6 June 09], Huffington Post blogger Geoffrey Dunn accused Palin of lifting passages from a column Gingrich co-authored with Craig Shirley in November 2005...
Ever not recognize text that you wrote earlier?
Posted on June 09, 2009In a piece titled Top 20 websites every scientist (or engineer) ought to know, Mary Spiro writes:Ever read some of your own writing and not recognize it? Maybe you didn?t write it and just forgot to put in the citation. Recently, scientific plagiarism is in the news...
Qui tam suit over patent marking on Solo cups
Posted on June 09, 2009The ABA Journal notes: Washington, D.C., patent lawyer Matthew Pequignot did some investigating after spotting patent markings on the lid to his daily cup of coffee and discovered that the patent had actually expired some 20 years before.Now the lawyer is seeking millions of dollars in damages in a qui tam suit against the lid maker, Solo Cup, that won a favorable ruling in March, the Associated Press reports...
Ariad returns?
Posted on June 08, 2009Patently-O has a post entitled Written Description: Araid Petitions en banc Federal Circuit to Eliminate Separate Written Description Requirement which includes a brief signed by John Whealan but listing James Dabney (once of Pennie & Edmonds and later of KSR fame) and John Duffy as authors...
Hatch/Otellini: Fully funding the patent office is a key to economic recovery
Posted on June 08, 2009In an opinion piece in the San Jose Mercury News, Senator Hatch and Intel CEO Otellini write:Fee diversion is nothing less than a tax on innovation.A fully funded patent office with fiscal flexibility would at the very least mean more and better trained patent examiners, more complete libraries of prior art, and greater deployment of modern information technologies to address the agency's growing needs...
Mike at Techdirt returns?
Posted on June 08, 2009After an absence of about six months, Mike at Techdirt left another content-less comment, this time on the IPBiz postGerman war on plagiarism with bounty hunters, or German confusion?. The link in question pertained to Mike Masnick's comments about the PALY High School (Palo Alto) plagiarism incident, and one can judge Mike's comment in that context:TechDirt: plagiarism as re-imagination and collaboration...
Heather Knox sues Victoria's Secret over US 7,074,108 (uplift bra)
Posted on June 07, 2009Heather M. Knox, of Monroeville, Allegheny County, Pennsylvania asserts that the BioFit bra of Victoria's Secret infringes claims of her patent in its larger D and DD sizes, where it features what the company calls "power mesh."A story in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette noted:"It's scary to go up against a big company, but I think in the end, the right decision will be made," said Ms...
Houston patent legend Tom Arnold dies at 85
Posted on June 07, 2009The Houston Chronicle noted the passing of Tom Arnold at age 85. Included in the text:?He was literally the president of every association even remotely associated with patents, trademarks and copyrights,? John Lynch said. ?If there was a seminar somewhere, Tom was on the podium...
Larson v. Correct Craft on patent assignment
Posted on June 06, 2009The CAFC, on jurisdictional grounds, does not resolve the assignment issues in Larson v. Correct Craft, but does at least itemize things that can go wrong in assignment matters involving non-employees.Larson's employment status was a topic of debate among the various parties, but he was asserting that he was inventor who (mistakenly) assigned his rights to Correct Craft...
Umbrella cockatoo
Posted on June 06, 2009As a followup to a comment to the IPBiz post Cockatoo confusion in Trenton. Luna. Lex and Howard. , IPBiz still states that umbrella cockatoos originated from certain islands in Indonesia, and do not come from Australia. Other cockatoos, such as that in the tv show Baretta, do come from Australia, but it is the umbrella cockatoo that is most common cockatoo pet...
Joint claim construction chart due June 12 in UTexas/Valence lithium battery case
Posted on June 06, 2009A kind IPBiz reader sent in a "stipulation" which gives the forthcoming schedule in HydroQuebec, University of Texas v. Valence case on a patent on lithium batteries.Coming up on June 12: File Joint Claim Construction chart with List of Supporting Evidence (Extrinsic and Intrinsic) and simultaneous exchange of Pre-hearing Claim Construction Opening Brieß (20 page limit) The claim construction hearing (WD Texas (Austin)) is set for June 22-23...
The discoverer of buckyballs, again...
Posted on June 06, 2009A recent commenter to IPBiz (relating mainly to issues of the toxicity of buckyballs) included the statement:Dr. Colvin is a chemist at Rice University, the institution that discovered fullerene and that gives her and her colleagues a unique perspective...
German war on plagiarism with bounty hunters, or German confusion?
Posted on June 06, 2009An article in The Local begins:The internet has made stealing content easy, but more German businesses and individuals are starting to wage war against growing online plagiarism.And there will likely be more severe legal consequences as ideas of intellectual property adapt to the web, Hamburg-based company Textguard told The Local on Friday...
On peer nominations in popularity contests
Posted on June 06, 2009On May 5, 2009, AlwaysOn released the following:AlwaysOn, the insider's network covering the business of innovation, today announced its AlwaysOn East 100 Top Private Companies List. In order to be considered, private companies had to be nominated by their peers and demonstrate leadership in areas such as innovation, market potential, customer adoption, media buzz and investor value creation...
Visualizing plagiarism: the Meehan case
Posted on June 03, 2009In an interesting post titled What does plagiarism look like?, VizWorld presents a composite picture of pages of Meehan's thesis, with copied text highlighted in yellow. Earlier, in the Poshard case at SIU, the SIU Daily Egyptian had a side-by-side comparison...
CAFC affirms ED Tx in PureChoice v. Honeywell
Posted on June 03, 2009On the 112 P 2 question, the CAFC cited the Exxon case:A claim satisfies the definiteness requirement ?[i]f one skilled in the art would understand the bounds of the claim when read in light of the specification.? Exxon Research & Eng?g Co. v. United States, 265 F...
Google v. Microsoft: Android/Windows, Google/Bing
Posted on June 03, 2009A Bloomberg story Google?s Android Software to Run Laptops, Taking on Microsoft outlines some of the upcoming battles to occur between Google and Microsoft.Note Android is based on Linux. [Google introduced Android in 2007 as a software system for mobile phones...
Titan v. Case: litigants may err in addressing proper presumptions?
Posted on June 03, 2009Titan and Goodyear lost on a request for a preliminary injunction in a tractor tire design patent case.Interesting text from the CAFC-->In the appeal before us, the parties stated the issue as whether Case succeeded before the trial court in raising a substantial question of invalidity...
Greenfuel: IP for sale
Posted on June 03, 2009Wade Roush at XConomy notes that Greenfuel, which ceased operation on May 13, is selling off assets, including IP:In a post on its website June 2, 2009, the company said it?s entertaining offers for its basic algae production technology?big tanks designed to be installed next to facilities such as cement plants that emit lots of carbon dioxide, which can be captured and converted into plant matter through photosynthesis...
Brill argues for stronger inequitable conduct penalties
Posted on June 02, 2009Alex Brill in Forbes:Congress, engaged in an ambitious process to reform the patent system in the U.S., is contemplating changing the rules with regard to inequitable conduct. Shockingly, however, they are being asked to weaken, not strengthen, the deterrent against fraud...
Sanofi's PARP inhibitor
Posted on June 02, 2009Sanofi-Aventis bought BiPar to obtain rights to BiPar's BSI-201, which belongs to a new class of drugs that block a cell repair enzyme known as PARP. An issue is that BiPar's main composition patent in the US runs out in 2013, although it might be extended.
GM to file bankruptcy 1 Jun 09
Posted on June 01, 2009From a Bloomberg report:?GM going through bankruptcy is a very positive thing for the auto industry: They should emerge as a reasonable competitor,? said Len Blum, managing director at investment- banking firm Westwood Capital LLC in New York. ?The only thing that?s been holding GM back is labor contracts and relationships with debtors and franchisees...
Death of Paul Haney, voice of Gemini and Apollo
Posted on June 01, 2009Yahoo News reported the death of Paul Haney, who was known as the "voice of NASA's Mission Control" for his live televised reports during the early years of the space program.Project Mercury flights were accompanied by the voice of John A. "Shorty" Powers .
Supreme Court to hear Bilski
Posted on June 01, 2009On June 1, the day General Motors filed for bankruptcy, the Supreme Court decided to hear Bilski.The LA Times wrote:While some software and business consulting giants backed Bilski's quest for a broad, inclusive definition of what is patentable, others, including Microsoft Corp...
ArticleOne and Merck's Singulair: the need to cite employee science articles in the IDS
Posted on May 31, 2009A May 29 WSJ piece begins:The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has ordered a re-examination of a key patent for Merck & Co.'s blockbuster Singulair allergy and asthma drug, saying new questions have been raised about its "patentability."and includes the text:In April, a firm called Article One Partners LLC filed a request with the Patent Office to re-examine the patent, citing information that wasn't brought to the attention of the patent examiner who reviewed Merck's initial application in the 1990s, including a paper by a Merck scientist...
Pravda post on Obama: America as Weimar Republic?
Posted on May 30, 2009A post on english.pravda.ru titled American capitalism gone with a whimper began withIt must be said, that like the breaking of a great dam, the American decent into Marxism is happening with breath taking speed, against the back drop of a passive, hapless sheeple, excuse me dear reader, I meant people...
Isolated points
Posted on May 29, 2009There are currently over 100 mentions of wikipedia on IPBiz. On May 28, IPBiz got a harsh comment about one of them:The statement "wikipedia has altered entries" indicates a serious misunderstanding of Wikipedia. The transformation you observed in Wikipedia's Joe Biden entry may very well have reflected political bias, but it's the bias of the "editor" who made the change, not of Wikipedia...
Innovation and invention, again
Posted on May 29, 2009IPWatchDog had a post on 9 March 09 titled Change in Patent Office Philosophy Can Lead Recovery which included the text:What we need is a novel approach to issuing patents. It has always seemed strange to me that we call the patent process a non-adversarial ex parte process...
The Great Canadian Cut-and-Paste Caper
Posted on May 29, 2009Early in 2009, there was a ripple of irony when it was found that Southern Illinois University [SIU], home of a plagiarist President, had plagiarized text in its anti-plagiarism policy from Indiana University. Now, in May, we have the the great Canadian cut-and-paste caper, wherein the Conference Board of Canada, supposedly an independent research organization, copied without attribution text from the Intellectual Property Alliance, a US lobbying organization, to advocate positions in the area of copyright...
"We talk and it's gone"
Posted on May 28, 2009Ken Robertson was talking about broadcasters ripping off the print media in writing:"Broadcasters are used to this 'we talk and it's gone' mentality, and they get into a habit of taking short cuts."IP profs sometimes take the "we write and it's gone" approach to scholarship...
Sotomayor on IP
Posted on May 27, 2009One IPBiz reader complained that IPBiz had not commented on the IP decisions of Judge Sotomayor and sent along the following:Sotomayor SCOTUS case history: Intellectual propertyPosted: 06:53 PM ETFrom CNN Research Director Robert YoonWASHINGTON (CNN) ? During Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor's 17 years as a federal judge, the U...
Schatten quoted by Nature on GFP in marmosets
Posted on May 27, 2009One year after the discoverers of the green fluorescent protein won the Nobel Prize in chemistry ( Japanese-born Osamu Shimomura of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, Martin Chalfie of Columbia University in New York and Roger Tsien of the University of California, San Diego), other workers (Erika Sasaki and Hideyuki Okano of the Keio University School of Medicine in Japan ) put GFP in marmosets...
Alexander the Great to Aristotle on publications vs. trade secrets
Posted on May 27, 2009from livius.org:It would appear that Alexander the Great received from Aristotle not only his doctrines of Morals and of Politics, but also something of those more abstruse and profound theories which these philosophers, by the very names they gave them, professed to reserve for oral communication to the initiated, and did not allow many to become acquainted with...
GM bankruptcy looms
Posted on May 27, 2009AP reports:-->A General Motors Corp. bankruptcy filing seemed inevitable after a rebellion by its bondholders forced it to withdraw on Wednesday a plan to swap bond debt for company stock.GM has until Monday, June 1 to complete a government-ordered restructuring that includes debt reduction, labor cost cuts and plant closures...
Rectangular Roomba?
Posted on May 26, 2009Published US patent application 20080276407 has an abstractAn autonomous coverage robot includes a chassis having forward and rearward portions and a drive system carried by the chassis. The forward portion of the chassis defines a substantially rectangular shape...
The last racists in Europe, patent people?
Posted on May 26, 2009The IAM blog had some intense comments about quotes attributed to SAS's Kalliopi Spyridaki which appeared in the article Is the demand for patents stifling reform? by Paul Meller in Science Business:?We file only in the US, for reasons including the cost of filing and litigation in Europe as well as the complexity of the system here...
Twitter and Drudge
Posted on May 26, 2009A post at the Miami Herald Twitter poses risks for papers begins with Drudge:The end began in January 1998, when Matt Drudge broke the story on his blog that linked President Clinton amorously to a young White House intern. At least that's how his scoop is remembered, as a signature moment in the growing dominance of online news...
Patent fight in birth control area
Posted on May 25, 2009AP has a story which includes the text:Conceptus ( CPTS ) claims Hologic ( HOLX )'s plan to sell the Adiana birth control system will infringe on the patent for Conceptus' Essure system. Conceptus is asking the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California for an injunction against Adiana sales in the U...
More output from independent inventors in the bad economy
Posted on May 25, 2009Alana Semuels has a piece in the LATimes titled: Recession is giving inventors time to fine-tune their ideas. The first sentence has an allusion to Chester Carlson, the inventor of xerography: If we have the Great Depression to thank for inventions such as the Twinkie, Monopoly and the photocopier...
Artistic license
Posted on May 25, 2009The JMRI webpage discusses the "model train" case in a post titled: JMRI Defense: Articles by Others. Although IPBiz was "on" this case back in June 2006, the only mention of this on JMRI is the text: Another article by a patent attorney discussed aspects of the case in June...
Kanzius obtains US 7,510,555
Posted on May 25, 2009A search of the USPTO database on 25 May 09 revealed one patent issued to John Kanzius, US 7,510,555 issued on March 31, 2009. The first claim states:A method for killing or damaging target cells in a patient, comprising: introducing into the patient RF absorption enhancers capable of selectively binding to the target cells and further capable of generating sufficient heat to kill or damage the bound target cells by heat generated solely by the application of an RF field generated by an RF signal between a transmission head and a reception head that is different from the transmission head; arranging the transmission and reception heads on opposite sides of a portion of the patient for treatment; and irradiating the portion of the patient between the transmission and reception heads containing RF absorption enhancers with an RF field to kill or damage the target cells from the heat generated by the RF absorption enhancers...
Timex loses in Paragon case
Posted on May 25, 2009An assertion of infringement by Timex of claims of Paragon's US 6,736,759 got back on track, as the CAFC vacated the judgment of noninfringement by Judge Michael R. Barrett and remanded for further proceedings consistent with this opinion. Of disavowal of claim scope:?[A] patentee may limit the meaning of a claim term by making a clear and unmistakable disavowal of scope during prosecution...
Epistar gets to challenge validity of Philips' US 5,008,718
Posted on May 25, 2009Epistar v. ITC gets into issues with covenants not to challenge patent validity, andalso of issues of disavowal of claim scope.Of covenants not to challenge the validity of the patent:On August 30, 2001, Lumileds and UEC settled the litigation by negotiating and executing a Settlement Agreement and Mutual Release, Stipulated Consent Judgment, and License Agreement...
CAFC finds license inherently to include "have made" rights
Posted on May 25, 2009Corebrace went after Star for having a third party make a productunder the license of Corebrace to Star. Corebrace lost on a 12(b)(6)at district court and at the CAFC. The key line by the CAFC: The right to ?make, use, and sell? a product inherently includes the right to have it made by a third party, absent a clear indication of intent to the contrary...
CAFC grants mandamus, transfer of venue in Sanofi case
Posted on May 25, 2009In the case IN RE GENENTECH, INC. and BIOGEN IDEC INC., the petitioners sought, and obtained, a writ of mandamus to move the patent case from ED Texas to ND California. The opposing party, Sanofi-Aventis Deutschland GmbH, was represented by McDonnell Boehnen Hulbert & Berghoff LLP, of Chicago...
Siegel calls for NY Times to remove Dowd
Posted on May 25, 2009ROBERT S. SIEGEL writes on the Dowd plagiarism business:Slate?s Jack Shafer noted that Dowd handled herself well during the incident by responding promptly and openly with an explanation that was not an excuse. He adds that her next step should be a column telling readers how this whole thing happened...
Michel on Jaffe/Lerner
Posted on May 24, 2009The 271Blog has excerpts from a past speech by Judge Michel which include:And Professors Jaffee and Lerner, who are very highly qualified economists, wrote in their book, which many of you read, that the courts often give double damages and actually cited a case that I was involved in as an example of double damages, and they said that I gave both lost profit damage and reasonable royalty damages to the winning patentee...
Airplane toilet queue patent: it's back!
Posted on May 24, 2009In a 20 May 09 post titled Flushing away Bilski, Aaron R. Feigelson discusses U.S. Patent No. 7.535.367, Airplane lavatory reservation system, which evokes memories of IBM's6,329,919. Feigelson links to an EE Times article about a talk given by Jon Dudas in San Jose [Speaking at an IP symposium here on Wednesday (April 16, 2008) ] and suggests Dudas may have been referring to the '367 when Dudas talked about an application the USPTO ?recently received for what was claimed to be a better way to stand in line while waiting to use an airplane toilet? as an illustration of declining application quality...
Patent officials run amok?
Posted on May 24, 2009One finds the text --patent officials run amok-- within an editorial at the San Francisco Chronicle on the Myriad case.The editorial views gravity as an abstract idea, as distinct from a law of nature:Traditionally, the Supreme Court has held that no one is allowed to patent products of nature (like apples or gold), laws of nature (like E=MC squared) or abstract ideas (like gravity)...
Blogspot blogger accused of plagiarism
Posted on May 23, 2009The Toledo Blade reports that Former Lucas County (Ohio) Commissioner Maggie Thurber, who writes on thurbersthoughts.blogspot.com, resigned as columnist for the Toledo Free Press after being accused of plagiarism in a column about Memorial Day. The issue was one of plagiarism from the internet...
Grant plagiarist Chu sues Texas Southern University
Posted on May 23, 2009IPBiz had earlier discussed the plagiarism of a research grant application by physics prof Rambis Chu. Now, Chu has taken a leaf out of the San Filippo notebook and sued the university over due process issues. The Houston Chronicle reported:Chu, who was granted tenure as an associate professor of physics last spring, is accused of submitting a grant proposal to the U...
USPTO examiners told to allow more cases?
Posted on May 23, 2009A post on 22 May at IPWatchDog titled Patent Examiners Told To Issue Patents includes the text: The patent examiner told Mark that about 2 weeks ago management told the examining corps that they need to start issuing patents. This may seem strange to those who are not familiar with how the Patent Office has been operating, but this is sadly important news to report...
Tessera wins at ITC
Posted on May 23, 2009Forbes, through AP, reported: Shares of Tessera Technologies Inc. soared Thursday, 21 May 09, a day after a patent dispute ruling that could give a substantial boost to the company's earnings.One of the losers at the ITC was Qualcomm, who had been lionized by Jaffe and Lerner in Innovation and Its Discontents...
On "nonpartisan" organizations
Posted on May 23, 2009The californiastemcellreport noted of the proposed NIH guidelines on stem cells:Citing the ?perverse effect? of proposed NIH stem cell research rules, the Consumer Watchdog group today [20 May 09] called for changes in the guidelines along the lines recommended by the California stem cell agency and the Interstate Alliance on Stem Cell Research...
Dowd's use of ghostwriters?
Posted on May 22, 2009Maureen Dowd used material from a blog without attribution to ANYONE, and later said she got it from a friend.The CSMonitor via Politico on the Dowd plagiarism business:But that raised other issues about whether it?s common practice for Dowd to use entire passages from friends in her column without attribution...
CEO of Heifer International Foundation resigns over plagiarism investigation
Posted on May 22, 2009Details are sketchy but the plagiarism investigation may involve the book Circle of Giving: Donors' Stories of Wisdom, which was published in 2006 by Eudora Press LLC of Little Rock. The Arkansas News wrote:Heifer Foundation replaced its president and chief executive 21 May 09 amid an investigation into allegations of copyright infringement and plagiarism...
Microsoft loses $200M jury verdict in ED Texas
Posted on May 22, 2009On 20 May 09, a jury in ED Texas found that Microsoft had infringed claims of I4i's U.S. Patent No. 5,787,499. ComputerWorld noted:The technology that the court said infringes on the i4i patent enables custom XML tagging in Word 2003 and Word 2007, used mainly for people creating and modifying templates for Word documents...
Who gets fired first, older or younger people?
Posted on May 21, 2009In a piece titled With Jobs Scarce, Age Becomes an Issue , Dana Mattioli suggests that younger workers, not older workers, may bear the brunt of reductions-in-force during the current economic downturn. Various lawyers are quoted:Age-discrimination lawsuits brought by older workers can cost more than the salary of the worker who was laid off and can hurt the company's reputation, according to Andria Ryan, partner at Atlanta law firm Fisher & Phillips LLP...
IP law profs and footnotes: gambling in Casablanca?
Posted on May 14, 2009IPBiz hasn't seen much fallout from Steve Perlman calling a certain IP professor "a fucking liar". The 271blog wrote:At one point, it even sounds like he calls one of the authors that contributed to matters cited in the Congressional Report a "f***ing liar" (this is not crystal clear, but you can judge for yourself at about the 7:35 point of the video) [See Video: Intel, Startups Debate Patent Reform Efforts]The words sound crystal clear in the clip and the targeted offender is identified...
McKiernan McClellan'd
Posted on May 14, 2009One IPBiz reader exactly got my point on McKiernan's demise. Palin did not mis-speak in the Vice-Presidential debate. She was using Civil War-speak to predict, accurately, McKiernan's termination and rationale therefore. The oafish reporters completely missed the subtle, intentional malapropism.
Meet the new obviousness, same as the old obviousness?
Posted on May 14, 2009Teva, represented by Kenyon & Kenyon, lost its appeal from a decision of Judge Farnan (D. Del.) in Procter & Gamble v. Teva over patents relating to the compound risedronate, the active ingredient of P&G?s osteoporosis drug Actonel®.The case involved allegations of obviousness...
ACLU sues the US patent office
Posted on May 14, 2009In a suit in SD NY, captioned Association for Molecular Pathology, et al. v. U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, et al., attorneys from the ACLU and PubPat go after patents to Myriad which involve BRCA.A story at biocompare notes:The patents granted to Myriad give the company the exclusive right to perform diagnostic tests on the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes and to prevent any researcher from even looking at the genes without first getting permission from Myriad...
Wikipedia, journalists tricked on Jarre entry
Posted on May 12, 2009From tech.yahoo:Shane Fitzgerald said one of his University College Dublin classes was exploring how quickly information was transmitted around the globe. His private concern was that, under pressure to produce news instantly, media outlets were increasingly relying on Internet sources ? none more ubiquitous than the publicly edited Wikipedia...
McKiernan gone; remember his impact in the VP debate?
Posted on May 12, 2009News yahoo reports:Gates announced that he had asked for and requested the resignation of his top commander in Afghanistan, Army General David McKiernan, after only 11 months in that theater. The 37-year veteran will be replaced by Army Lieutenant General Stanley McChrystal...
DNA analysis shows truth to "switched at birth"
Posted on May 12, 2009When LBE wrote on DNA profiling for the University of Chicago Roundtable, he wondered when DNA would be used to prove a "switched at birth" story. In 2009, there is one.There had been rumors that Kay Rene Reed Qualls (now of Heppner, Oregon) and DeeAnn Angell Shafer (now of Richland, Wash...
Lemley predicting a return of fee diversion from the USPTO?
Posted on May 11, 2009Suzanne Kubota of FederalNewsRadio.com wrote:While a drop in applications will reduce the workload, Lemley says what little funding that does come into the Office is at risk.Congress has had a tendency to take away some of that fee revenue and use it towards the general federal revenue and I think that's probably going to be an attractive alternative for Congress because of the substantial budget deficit...
More publication fraud in stem cell area?
Posted on May 11, 2009Xinhua reports of charges made by Lu Daopei against Huang Xiaojun:Lu, who teaches at Peking University and Fudan University in Shanghai, displayed a certificate at a press conference in Beijing Thursday [7 May 09] showing that in 2006, he was recognized as the leader of a group that developed a new medical treatment protocol for preventing rejection of stem cell transplants in diseases such as leukemia...
IBM patent application on scheduling business meetings
Posted on May 11, 2009In the flap that followed IBM's patent application on outsourcing methods (20090083107), IBM spokesman Steve Malkiewicz said Monday, 30 March 09 the application would be withdrawn because it "is contrary to our patent policy on business methods." On May 7, 2009 , one got a look at US published application 20090119148, titled SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR ENHANCING PRODUCTIVITY, which includes claims:Claim 1: A method including:defining, by a user, a time template including a plurality of predefined time intervals for scheduling meetings; andapplying the time template across a collaborative system...
Patent deal in renewable wave energy
Posted on May 11, 2009Reuters notes: Wind-farm developer Renewable Energy Holdings Plc said on 11 May 09 it had agreed to sell its wave energy patent portfolio, known as CETO, to Australia's Carnegie Corp Ltd for about 30 million pounds ($45 million).
Video of Simon / Perlman debate on patent reform
Posted on May 10, 2009The video of the Simon - Perlman discussion of patent reform (on 6 May 09, at the Commonwealth Club of California) is worth a look, especially to see Perlman's comments on Professors Mark Lemley and John Thomas.Perlman mentions he contacted Mallun Yen of Cisco about papers supporting apportionment of damages...
The "modest proposal" for inventor ownership: too late in the day?
Posted on May 10, 2009Ron Watson at EDN in a piece titled, A modest proposal to save the Intellectual Property system from patent securitization, suggests:No one seems any longer interested in the original idea: that the patent system should protect the inventor?not his or her employer?and by protecting the inventor encourage publication of the work, thereby accelerating the pace of innovation...
Akin Gump loses jury verdict in patent prosecution malpractice case
Posted on May 10, 2009The ABAJournal notes: Jurors in a San Antonio federal trial have awarded plaintiffs $72.6 million in a malpractice case against Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld.The underlying issue was failure to disclose a reference to the USPTO: the plaintiffs had alleged the law firm failed to disclose material information to the U...
Plagiarism, not about intent, but sloppiness?
Posted on May 10, 2009The Tuscaloosa News quoting Carl Boening, now chair of the behavioral studies division at Shelton State Community College on the Meehan matter :?There?s some interesting similarities in the language that was used, but plagiarism a lot of times is not about intent, but sloppiness...
Plagiarism and the scientific method?
Posted on May 09, 2009Within the Tuscaloosa News on Meehan's thesis:So far, so good. I can't see anything wrong with extending one line of research in new directions. In fact, that's what the scientific method is all about. We do similar things with news stories. If one newspaper looks at an issue in their hometown, we may look at the same issue here...
Forbes on biofuels
Posted on May 07, 2009Forbes notes 1,865 companies in biofuels. They talk about some in an article titled: Biofuels Battle: Chemistry Versus Biology.Of algae:These specialized algae, though, require special care. They must be kept in contained, and expensive, "bioreactors" for example, so they won't be out-competed by wild algae...
Supreme Court reverses CAFC in Carlsbad
Posted on May 07, 2009For a blast to the past, review comments on Patently-O in Feb 09.
HG Wells and plagiarism
Posted on May 07, 2009An recent opinion piece in niagarathisweek recounts the story of plagiarism asserted against HG Wells by Florence Deeks.The story had been recounted in: The Spinster and the Prophet: H.G. Wells, Florence Deeks, and the Case of the Plagiarized Text, by A...
Abbott goes after J&J over Simponi
Posted on May 07, 2009The WSJ notes Abbott is going after J&J and writes:Abbott, of Abbott Park, Ill., markets Humira, a treatment for rheumatoid arthritis and other conditions, which competes with J&J's Remicade. J&J's follow-up to Remicade, Simponi, was approved by the U...
Monsanto, DuPont tangle over stacking limit in license of biotech patent
Posted on May 06, 2009The Wall Street Journal writes of a suit by Monsanto against DuPont over DuPont's new seed that contains two genes that have been modified to make the plant tolerate herbicides. One is a DuPont gene that allows the soybean plant to tolerate exposure to glyphosate-based weedkiller as well as to another herbicide called acetolate synthase...
PatentHawk says Edison never ran a company nor made a product
Posted on May 05, 2009Joining the ranks of Edison misunderstanders (including Jaffe/Lerner and Merges/Nelson), PatentHawk (Gary Odom) stated on 4 May 09:Thomas Edison never ran a company, never made a product, never sold anything but patents. He did also say: Reinvention is the epitome of unproductivity, and so the idea of rewarding reinvention is antithetical to promoting technological progress...
Google's US 7,508,978: "only in America"
Posted on May 05, 2009There is some buzz on Google's US 7,508,978, titled Detection of grooves in scanned images, with first claimA system comprising: an infrared projector; a pattern mask located in an output path of the infrared projector; a stereoscopic camera to generate images of opposing pages of a document from which a three-dimensional image of a surface of the opposing pages of the document is generated; and control logic to process the three-dimensional image to locate a groove that is defined by the spine of the document and located between the opposing pages of the document...
More on the Meehan matter in Alabama
Posted on May 04, 2009An opinion by Edward Blackwelder on the Meehan plagiarism flap in Alabama:Nick Cenegy's article on Jacksonville State University President Bill Meehan's allegedly having plagiarized portions of his doctoral dissertation is misleading. Webster's New College Dictionary defines plagiarism as "to steal and use the ideas or writings of another as one's own...
Josh Lerner's new book: Boulevard of Broken Dreams
Posted on May 04, 2009A NYT blog ( CLAIRE CAIN MILLER) notes:Josh Lerner teaches a class on venture capital and will publish a book this fall called ?Boulevard of Broken Dreams? on how public efforts to spur entrepreneurship and venture capital have, so far, failed.He said the venture capital industry needs to focus on three other ideas to fix its problems...
The invention of Dr. Pepper?
Posted on May 04, 2009An AP story describes the discovery by Bill Waters of an old book which may relate to Dr. Pepper:He noticed there were several sheets with letterheads hinting at its past, like a page from a prescription pad from a Waco store titled "W.B. Morrison & Co...
Andy Grove likens patents to derivatives
Posted on May 04, 2009Bloomberg wrote about Grove on patents:If the government awards a patent -- granting a limited monopoly -- the onus should be on the owner to develop a product, Grove said.?You should not grant a monopoly to people who don?t produce,? said Grove, 72. ?Patents have become derivatives of the invention and have a life of their own...
Pitchmen on Discovery
Posted on May 04, 2009On 3 May 09, Philly's Channel 3 (KYW) pushed the upcoming "reality" series called "Pitchmen" on Discovery, involving major pitchman Billy Mays. Channel 3 pursued the "invention" angle, though an earlier story in the Daily News went with infomercial. Mays says ays about 60% of his products make money, a far better batting average than achieved by issued US patents...
What would Buffet say about patent valuation?
Posted on May 04, 2009What would Warren Buffet say about patent valuation?In a piece on yahoo finance titled: Business Musings From Woodstock for Capitalists, one has the following text:Messrs. Buffett and Munger made clear their complete disdain for the use of higher-order mathematics in finance...
Concerning Georgia Pacific v. U.S. Plywood
Posted on May 03, 2009The following was submitted to the PatentHawk blog [Patent Prospector]:Of your text -- The 1970 Supreme Court decision in Georgia-Pacific v. United States Plywood laid down what has become the case law bible for assessing damages, listing 15 factors for consideration in assessing damages--, note that the 1970 decision is a district court decision [ 318 F...
Prediction and postdiction, pollution, and Cass Sunstein
Posted on May 03, 2009In 2008, the Michigan Law Review published an article titled Uncertainty revisited: legal prediction and legal postdiction [Vol. 108, page 467, which article also appears on SSRN].The abstract notes:Legal scholarship, following rational-choice theory, has traditionally treated uncertainty as a single category...
Apple on carbon fiber: "tired", unexciting look
Posted on May 02, 2009In paragraph 6 of published application 20090110872, Apple inventors write:Despite the many benefits of carbon fiber composites, such composites are typically black and the carbon fibers are typically visible on the composite surface. In addition, the fibers (either as a unidirectional, woven, or nonwoven substrate) are typically variable in their construction and therefore are variable in their surface presentation...
Testimony on patent reform on 30 April 2009
Posted on May 02, 2009Rick Merritt gave a summary of testimony on the draft Patent Reform Act of 2009 (HR 1260) which includedTop attorney's for Cisco Systems and Intel Corp.?both members of the Coalition on Patent Fairness?testified in favor of the bill, asking members to bolster provisions limiting damages...
Bob Park on "60 Minutes"/fusion: it's all one chemist
Posted on May 01, 2009From Bob Park on 1 May 09 on Irving Dardik, whose company was featured in the "60 Minutes" episode on cold fusion:But Dardik doesn't do equations. Instead he hired a flack, Roger Lewin, to gush endlessly about him in a 2005 book, Making Waves, with a Forward by, uh, Michael McKubre...
Of Hamilton's nomination to CA7
Posted on May 01, 2009Within the article ?Hamilton sails through 2nd hearing?, one hasInstead, Coburn asked Hamilton about his view of using international law as guidance and about a comment he had made about judges writing the footnotes to the Constitution. Hamilton said he was making the point that judges are not trying to do something new, but are applying old principles and constitutional provisions to new situations...
Apparent Schizophrenia Redux
Posted on April 30, 2009In a post titled Microsoft sends mixed patent message , Dana Blankenhorn talks about the mixed signals Microsoft sends on its patent policy.Perhaps Blankenhorn should read up on IBM's apparent patent schizophrenia.See for example:IBM patent policy: apparent schizophrenia? IBM's "apparent schizophrenia" on patent policy revisited Further query: do we need an "apparent schizophrenic" as USPTO director?**Returning to Microsoft, IAM notes a bit of a dust-up in the Microsoft/TomTom settlement:Speaking in a session based on the EPO's Scenarios for the Future project, [Keith] Bergelt [of OIN] explained that under Dutch law, a company only has to reveal how much it has paid to settle a dispute if the amount exceeds a certain percentage of its market capitalisation...
BusinessWeek presents Leahy (pro)/Rohrabacher (con) on patent reform
Posted on April 30, 2009In "The Debate Room", BusinessWeek gave pro/con commentary on the proposition: The Patent Reform Act Means ProgressThe current U.S. patent system is broken. It stifles innovation. Congress needs to pass the Patent Reform Act now. Pro or con?On the pro-side, Senator Leahy wrote: Patent reform is about economic development...
On Hatch-Waxman settlements
Posted on April 29, 2009FoxNews reports on the settlement of a Hatch-Waxman case between Orion and Wockhardt:Orion Corporation ("Orion") and Wockhardt USA, LLC and Wockhardt Limited (together "Wockhardt") today [April 29] announce that they have executed a settlement agreement on lawsuits filed by Orion in the United States against Wockhardt regarding Wockhardt's submission of abbreviated new drug applications ("ANDAs") for generic versions of Orion's Comtan(R: 25...
Bob Park says CBS has altered "60 Minutes" story on cold fusion
Posted on April 29, 2009In his 24 April 09 "What's New," Bob Park says that CBS has Sikahema'd part of the "60 Minutes" piece on cold fusion:Last Sunday's edition of the CBS News program 60 Minutes was titled "Race to Fusion." It was 1989, Fleischmann and Pons are shown with the "cold fusion" test tube that would have killed them had they been right...
"Not victory, but progress"
Posted on April 29, 2009Within the law review titled Remembering the Public's Interest in the Patent System - A Post-Grant Opposition Designed to Benefit the Public, one has the text:As the French essayist and moralist Joseph Joubert stated, "[T]he aim of argument, or discussion, should not be victory, but progress...
"Laws against stealing America's intellectual property"
Posted on April 29, 2009Further to a comment by Joe Mullin [Copying, or the lack thereof, _is_ highly relevant to all aspects of the patent debate as long the public and Congress *believe* that patent lawsuits are about copying or "stealing." That's not a "Lemley-ism", that is just reality -- backed up by many sources...
Joe Mullin on copying
Posted on April 28, 2009On April 26, IPBiz had a post titled Mike Masnick (TechDirt) takes on Gary Odom (PatentHawk), which mentioned a statement made by Gary Odom about Joe Mullin as noted by Masnick:Amusingly, when Joe Mullin from IP Law & Business called Odom to comment, Odom refused, saying: "You're a hack job, man...
iParadigms issues press release on victory at CA4
Posted on April 28, 2009PRNewswire (April 27): The US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit issued a published decision on April 16 affirming a lower court's finding of fair use for iParadigms, LLC, the company that provides Turnitin, in a closely-watched copyright infringement case brought by four high school students...
Turning patents into money
Posted on April 27, 2009The Deal has a story including the text:Michael Pierantozzi of iPotential: "Patent management used to be an afterhought. That's changing. There's been a transition from treating patents as legal assets to treating them as business assets." It's certainly not a new phenomenon, adds Pierantozzi...
Qualcomm to pay Broadcom $891 million to settle patent dispute
Posted on April 27, 2009Yahoo Tech News reported: Chip maker Qualcomm Inc. said late Sunday [26 April 09] it will pay Broadcom Corp. $891 million over four years to settle a longstanding dispute over patents and royalties.The company said it will pay $200 million of the settlement in the quarter ending June 30...
Cheap fast food may not be good for you...
Posted on April 26, 2009So many internet posts are about lists. Within Big Macs and Fries: What You Pay Per Calorie, one has a list of certain fast foods, grouped in terms of (dollars) per (100 calories). The somewhat obvious punchline:Looking at the cost per 100 calories of some items underscores what nutritionists have been saying for years: The cheapest calories typically aren't the healthiest...
Mike Masnick (TechDirt) takes on Gary Odom (PatentHawk)
Posted on April 26, 2009An April 24 post at TechDirt tited 28 More Companies Sued Over Grouped Toolbars Patent begins:You may recall last summer that we wrote about Gary Odom (as known as Patent Hawk) who has been known to stop by our site here to throw around an insult or two (nice guy!)...
Sikahema'd again
Posted on April 26, 2009John Molloy at ZDNet on an altered internet post relating to Microsoft:You know what? This is the Internet and this sort of stuff SHOULDN'T happen. So for your edification here is a link to the Google Cache of the original article:HereAnd if that goes down here is a link to a pdf of the original article:HereAnd here is a link to the sanitized version:HereBut probably isn't worth the effort as it seems to have Microsoft Marketing written all over it...
It's the battery, stupid!
Posted on April 26, 2009Within an article titled Report: Hanging on to Old Notebooks a Bad Idea, one has For example, most firms don't think about battery replacement as a cost issue, but it happens. The average is about 300 recharge cycles, meaning one or two years' lifespan before a new battery is needed...
Flap over Lord Monckton testifying before Congress
Posted on April 25, 2009Those who have followed "patent reform" know about how Congressman Berman declined to allow critics of patent reform to testify before Congress. A similar matter has arisen in the discussion of climate issues.From ClimateDepot:UK's Lord Christopher Monckton, a former science advisor to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, claimed House Democrats have refused to allow him to appear alongside former Vice President Al Gore at a high profile global warming hearing on Friday April 24, 2009 at 10am in Washington...
More activity in lithium battery litigations
Posted on April 25, 2009An IPBiz reader noted that a re-examination certificate was issued on 22 April 09 on Armand's patent titled CATHODE MATERIALS FOR SECONDARY (RECHARGEABLE) LITHIUM BATTERIES [6,514,640]. See 90/008,205.According to a document filed 22 Dec 2008, claims were amended...
FAX only?
Posted on April 25, 2009IPBiz notes text in a recent IAM post:I was somewhat baffled when calling multinational company DuPont this afternoon. Trying in vain to speak to a member of its IP group about speaking at the upcoming IP Business Congress on green IP issues, I was informed by a very friendly and profusely apologetic receptionist that any correspondence concerning conferences must be submitted to the office via fax...
Apple willfully infringed '291 snooping patent
Posted on April 25, 2009A jury in ED Texas has found that Apple willfully infringed US 6,405,291 titled Predictive snooping of cache memory for master-initiated accesses with abstract:When a PCI-bus controller receives a request from a PCI-bus master to transfer data with an address in secondary memory, the controller performs an initial inquire cycle and withholds TRDY# to the PCI-bus master until any write-back cycle completes...
LA Times criticizes NIH stem cell policy
Posted on April 25, 2009In an editorial on April 25, the Los Angeles Times wrote:The new NIH rules would not allow the use of federal money for studying stem cell lines derived from embryos created specifically for research. Such research might involve attempts to produce genetically matched organs for transplant or stem cell lines that reflect racial and ethnic diversity...
Judge Posner finds glass sex toy obvious
Posted on April 25, 2009In Ritchie v. Vast Resources, we have Judge Richard Posner (of the 7th Circuit, sitting by designation at the Federal Circuit) reviewing a decision on obviousness in a case on sex aids arising from the Middle District of Florida. Judge Posner sets up the case:The plaintiffs own a manufacturer, called Know Mind Enterprises, and the defendant, doing business under the name Topco Sales, is another manufacturer...
BusinessWeek flubs discussion on patents
Posted on April 24, 2009In an article in BusinessWeek titled The U.S. Is Losing Its Lead in Patents , Michael Arndt writesLast year, for the first time, the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office issued more patents to foreigners than to Americans. IPBiz suggests that "last year" is not the first time non-US entities received more US patents than US entities...
After USAir incident, FAA releases data on animal/plane collisions
Posted on April 24, 2009Remember the fuss to get the USPTO to make issued patents available on the internet? It took the USAir incident to get the FAA to release data on airplane/animal collisions, which showed (among other things):The data shows that since 2000, John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York reported at least 30 accidents where damage was either substantial or the plane was actually destroyed...
Another university president accused of plagiarizing his Ph.D. thesis
Posted on April 23, 2009In 2007, IPBiz noted a report in the Birmingham News: Jacksonville State University officials are investigating other newspaper columns that appeared under the byline of school President William Meehan after a second instance of plagiarism was brought to their attention...
Problems presented by the backlog of unexamined patent applications
Posted on April 23, 2009In discussing aspects of the patent application backlog problem, IPWatchDog notes:For better or for worse, investors are not always able to make their own independent judgments with respect to the quality of an underlying technology that is the basis for a start-up company...
CSIRO gets settlement in WiFi wars
Posted on April 22, 2009The Australian reported on 22 April 09: AUSTRALIA'S top science agency has walloped some of the world's biggest industrial giants in the US patent courts to bring the country a pay check worth up to $1 billion over the next five to 10 years.The CSIRO has won its long-running battle to enforce a patent on technology used in Wi-fi connections that have become virtually ubiquitous in laptops and other devices around the world...
Nobel plagiarism?
Posted on April 22, 2009MonstersAndCritics says: A decade-old plagiarism case could be reopened in Spain against 1989 Nobel Literature Prize winner Camilo Jose Cela, the daily El Pais reported 21 April 09.**In passing, note a "dreamworld" discussion of plagiarism in the Massachusetts Daily Collegian, titled No 2nd chance in the case of plagiarismNewsflash: Joe Biden, who committed plagiarism at Syracuse Law, got a second chance and is currently Vice-President...
Stephanie Meyer (Twilight) accused of "idea infringement"?
Posted on April 21, 2009Hollyscoop reports:Heidi Stanton, who studied alongside Meyer at Brigham Young University in Utah claims Meyers stole the vampire story from her because it's very similar to a short story she wrote while they were attending college together. Stanton filed her lawsuit against Meyer in Utah last Tuesday, April 14th alleging idea infringement...
Bodog dispute settled?
Posted on April 21, 2009from PR Newswire: "While the Morris Mohawk Gaming Group was not the judgment debtor, the MMGG is the exclusive licensee of the "Bodog" brand within the region and, as such, activities that impact the brand necessarily impact our businesses. We are pleased to have worked constructively with 1st Technology and its principals to bring an end to this protracted dispute...
Tate & Lyle loses (again) on sucralose at ITC
Posted on April 21, 2009IndyStar reported: Heartland Sweeteners said April 20 the United States International Trade Commission unanimously upheld an initial ITC ruling that found Heartland did not infringe Tate & Lyle patents for sucralose. See previous IPBiz post:http://ipbiz...
CBS Radio and others sued in ED Texas over US 6,577,716
Posted on April 21, 2009RadioInk reports: Aldav LLC has filed suit against Clear Channel, Cumulus, Citadel, CBS Radio, Entercom, Saga, Cox Radio, Univision, Regent, Gap, Radio One, and the Aloha Station Trust, claiming that, by replacing advertising and other content in their online streams, the broadcasters are infringing on a patent on which Aldav holds a license...
"60 Minutes" favorable to cold fusion on April 19, 2009
Posted on April 20, 2009A videoclip and a transcript of the favorable piece (titled Cold Fusion Is Hot Again ) appear on the cbsnews website.Within the text: Scientists today like to call it a nuclear effect rather than cold fusion. At least 20 labs working independently have published reports of excess heat - heat up to 25 times greater than the electricity going in...
The CAFC considers patent pools in Princo case
Posted on April 20, 2009In Princo v. ITC, the CAFC discussed patent pools:Jefferson Parish Hosp. Dist. No. 2 v. Hyde, 466 U.S. 2, 40-44 (1984) (O?Connor, J., concurring in judgment) (?Tie-ins may entail economic benefits as well as economic harms, and . . . these benefits should enter the rule-of-reason balance...
Attendance at San Diego trade show snags Brazilian company
Posted on April 20, 2009As a warning to foreign companies, note that attending trade shows in theUS can create specific jurisdiction. The CAFC noted in SYNTHES v. GMReis of specific jurisdiction:We have, however, outlined a three-factor test for specific jurisdiction, which considers whether (1) the defendant purposefully directed its activities at residents of the forum, (2) the claim arises out of or relates to the defendant?s activities with the forum, and (3) assertion of personal jurisdiction is reasonable and fair...
New directions in the iPhone?
Posted on April 19, 2009CNET notes:The blog MacRumors.com reports that Apple has published two patent applications in the past few weeks that focus on features that incorporate motion and gesture user interfaces. The published applications are:2009008820420090100384
Coskata receives unfavorable Office Action on clostridium (11/441,392)
Posted on April 19, 2009On 24 Feb 09, Coskata was mailed a non-final Office Action, rejecting all pending claims in the case involving Clostridium(application 11/441,392). Rejections included 101, 112, and 102.Separately, some of their bioreactor applications have published...
The relationship between the IP world and the mainstream media
Posted on April 19, 2009The IAM blog had a further post on the general topic of "journalism of patent matters." IPBiz agrees with the final paragraph:There are a lot of similarities between the C-suite executive and the business journalist who do not "get" IP. They both need a narrative that resonates so that their interest can be sparked...
The return of the Mashelkar report on pharma patenting in India
Posted on April 19, 2009In a post titled The "Mashelkar Committee Report" on Pharma Patenting Resurfaces! , Spicy IP discusses how the Indian government "finalized" the Mashelkar report. The punchline:In short, the Committee notes, and rightly so, that any attempt to exclude an entire class of inventions i...
Prior art subtraction/essential features
Posted on April 18, 2009Rooklidge and Shah wrote in the March 2009 IPT: [Leahy] suggested that the "Supreme Court?s Quanta decision may offer a useful way of describing the truly inventive feature of a patent," referring to the Supreme Court?s recent Quanta Computer, Inc. v...
"The Pirate Bay" sunk?
Posted on April 18, 2009The Pirate Bay lost at trial in Sweden. InformationWeek reported: Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Peter Sunde, and Carl Lundstroem were sentenced to one year in prison and ordered to pay compensation and damages totaling $3.6 million. There will be an appeal...
Anti-patent diatribe on californiastemcellreport
Posted on April 17, 2009The folks in California, like IBM's Kappos, have taken a schizophrenic view of patents: those of my competitor are bad, and mine are good. In a post titled New Stem Cell Patent Ruckus in California, Dave Jensen wrote of an issue involving Stem Cells Inc...
Tweeting
Posted on April 16, 2009Inside Track on a comment by Holland & Knight spokeswoman Aimee Steel about tweeting:Asked about the tweeting, Steel said, ?We are aware of it, and believe that any intelligent person would immediately question the credibility of anonymous bloggers such as this...
CSI-AstroQuest: "ideas are a dime a dozen"
Posted on April 16, 2009On 16 April 09, CSI had a show featuring Star Trek themes, but the underlying murder was about idea-stealing. The guy who says "ideas are a dime a dozen" gets whacked by the idea-originator.from scifiwire:We screened the episode and were surprised to see not only Battlestar Galactica cast member Kate Vernon, but also cameos by a couple of other Battlestar players: Ronald D...
InformationWeek clueless on patent procedure?
Posted on April 16, 2009Dave Methwin writes:The past week has delivered yet another example that our patent system is horribly broken. On April 9, a jury found that Microsoft infringed on Lucent/Alcatel touch-screen patents. But wait! On April 13, news stories reported that a March 26 re-examination by the US Patent Office said aspects of the patent were "an obvious variation of know-how that was public...
Made in Oregon?
Posted on April 15, 2009IPBiz notes an interesting dispute over a ?Made in Oregon? sign atop the White Stag building in Portland.In Trenton, we have "Trenton Makes --the World Takes" on a bridge, reflecting a long ago time. We also had a naming dispute when Trenton State became College of New Jersey, the name formerly used by Princeton University.
The mistakes of journalists: cringeworthy?
Posted on April 15, 2009The following comment at IAM evoked images of Eli Kintisch and Eugenie Reich:Nowadays, almost all generalist media (and even some specialist media) reports on even basic science, engineering, finance, law, etc. are plagued with cringeworthy factual mistakes and misunderstandings...
Roche sues Mylan in Hatch-Waxman case over Xeloda
Posted on April 15, 2009Hoffmann-La Roche filed the lawsuit April 8, 2009 in the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey.
What happens to the blog when the blogger dies? Are blogs eternal?
Posted on April 15, 2009Dave Goldman writes: Sean Healy created a blog at unknowncolumn.blogspot.com and posted defamatory content about speedskater Shani Davis' mom, Cherie Davis.The complaint further alleges that Healy is now deceased, so he can no longer remove the content on Cherie's demand, and he did not have a "probate estate" to take over his blog...
Alcatel-Lucent receives unfavorable re-exam result
Posted on April 14, 2009Bloomberg reported: An Alcatel-Lucent SA patent that resulted in a $358 million jury verdict against Microsoft Corp. was rejected [in a re-exam Office Action] by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office after the agency took a second look at the invention...
DeWitt goes after Fish piece in NYT on Churchill
Posted on April 13, 2009As noted earlier by IPBiz, the piece by Stanley Fish on Churchill in the NYT had problems. Here is what Larry DeWitt said:It is unclear which report Fish read in preparation for his NYT column, perhaps he did not himself fully grasp the nature of Churchill?s actions...
Protecting boat hulls
Posted on April 13, 2009A lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida, Orlando Division to protect the design of boat hulls. Hell?s Bay utilized several theories and had asked for a jury trial before a settlement was reached. Through its Orlando-based intellectual property attorneys of Beusse Wolter Sanks Mora, & Maire, P...
Edison and the light bulb
Posted on April 12, 2009An IPBiz commenter wrote:i'm a Chinese undergarduate, your blog is very interesting and helpful.since i can not find your email ,i have to use the "comment" to ask some questions about edison's patent here,i am sorry but still hope that you can help,you may find them veey childish even ridiculous, first: edison got the 223,898 patent Jan,1880 and then the patent was ruled invalid in 1883,right? then he got around six years in litigation and finally got the patent valid 1889,right? Second, suppose i got them all right above, can a patent in litigation be used to against others? the edison company sued some other companies in 1885 and one of the claimed infinged patents was 223,898,but then the patent was invalid ,how can they do that Third, this may fall out of your expertise,but what exactly 223,898 patented? the improvememt on the process of making Filment or a whole new filment ...
Coverage by news media of IP issues, educating management about IP
Posted on April 12, 2009IPBiz has been covering faulty (and/or deficient) coverage of IP in the news media for some time. If business managers really believe what they read in the media, they can form false impressions upon which they may act. IP Finance took a news piece in the Economist on the Nano and used it to criticize news coverage of IP issues:What am I supposed to make of the contents of the paragraph? After being told, in previous paragraphs, that the car is small but "surprisingly spacious"; that its zero to 60 mph takes 30 seconds, but that it is a good drive and fuel efficient; that the placement of the engine in the rear is a marvel of design; that it has some flaws (what car does not?), and that is the bane of environmentalists, we are now told that Tata has filed over 30 patent applications...
On software patents
Posted on April 11, 2009See the discussion by Jonathan Corbet titled: An afternoon among the patent lawyers, [concerning a session at the Wolf Law Building, University of Colorado at Boulder March 19, 2009 ] which included text :Beyond their basis in legislation, patents should, according to the US constitution, serve to encourage innovation in their field...
New push for allowances at the USPTO?
Posted on April 11, 2009Under a post at PatentHawk on changed overtime policies at the USPTO, one finds the following comments:I believe that the allowance rate is artificially low, although not due to churning...at least not exactly.I am a current examiner. Under Dudas, the PTO pursued a policy of "increased patent quality"...
Homewood, reprised
Posted on April 11, 2009In the continuing saga of visits to the Homewood Suites in Baltimore, this author returned to the scene of past bad service. The most interesting thing this time was not the room, but the breakfast. There was an absence of silverware, most pointedly of spoons, which might be necessary for eating cereal with milk...
Hewlett-Packard to appeal in Cornell case
Posted on April 11, 2009MarketWatch reported: Hewlett-Packard Co. on April 10 said it had filed an appeal in a patent dispute with Cornell University.See alsoAriad/MIT/Harvard smoked by CAFC in Lilly case
IP academics and IP practitioners: two worlds?
Posted on April 11, 2009Patently-O had noted: IP Scholars Conference 2009: This annual event will be held at Cardozo Law in NYC on August 6th and 7th, 2009. This is usually a large gathering of IP focused academics and academic minded individuals presenting original works-in-progress...
Wegner, USPTO both scorched by CAFC in Takeda
Posted on April 10, 2009A process patent issued as U.S. Patent No. 5,583,216 (the ?216 process patent to Takeda) on December 10, 1996 led to the double patenting issue in the appeal of the Takeda case, argued for Takeda by Harold C. Wegner. The opinion written by Judge Rader began: The United States District Court for the District of Columbia held that later developments in the art may inform the ?patentably distinct? determination for double patenting...
Rove, Biden tussle over "what Biden told Bush"
Posted on April 10, 2009Yahoo News noted of statements by Karl Rove about statements supposedly made by Joe Biden:The former Bush adviser [Rove] was referring to Biden?s comments earlier this week on CNN that he and President George W. Bush once had an exchange in the Oval Office, where Bush said, "Well, Joe ...
Some patent cliffs can't be seen
Posted on April 09, 2009A post on Motley Fool made the "drug patent situation" one of facile predictability:The patent cliff that almost every drugmaker is facing is the dark side of developing blockbuster drugs. Be it Pfizer's (NYSE: PFE) Lipitor, Eli Lilly's (NYSE: LLY) Zyprexa, or AstraZeneca's (NYSE: AZN) Nexium, it's going to hurt when the drugmakers start to face generic competition...
"Networking is building relationships through helping people"
Posted on April 09, 2009Mike Evers of Inside Counsel writes:Susan Sneider offers several definitions of networking from successful attorneys in her fabulous book, ?A Lawyer?s Guide to Networking.? But my favorite definition among those offered by Sneider comes from John Mitchell: ?Networking is building relationships through helping people...
Boeing wins patent case against NASA over aluminum alloy in shuttle
Posted on April 09, 2009The Los Angeles Times noted: Boeing Co. may get hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation after winning a patent-infringement claim against NASA over an aluminum alloy used to build the space shuttle.As this was a suit against the federal government, it was heard in the Court of Claims...
EPO rule changes: compulsory response to search reports
Posted on April 09, 2009Patent Baristas notes rules changes at the EPO, includingCompulsory response to European search reportsAt present, an applicant does not have to reply to any search report that the EPO issue. However, this will change when the new rules come into force...
CAFC addresses patent exhaustion in Transcore
Posted on April 09, 2009Exhaustion was found and the patentee lost.Of note:Rather, our analysis begins with the premise that one cannot convey what one does not own. This principle is particularly important in patent licensing, as the grant of a patent does not provide the patentee with an affirmative right to practice the patent but merely the right to exclude...
Original owner wins parrot custody battle
Posted on April 09, 2009ABCNews covered a custody battle over a lost-then-found African grey parrot, which was resolved in favor of the original owner. A law professor was quoted; David Favre seemed to think the "new" owner had a chance.One commenter wrote that this sort of thing was an economic stimulus package for lawyers...
BusinessWeek pushes Lemley book on patent reform
Posted on April 09, 2009In an article Are Patent Problems Stifling U.S. Innovation? < BusinessWeek promotes the upcoming Lemley/Burke book The Patent Crisis and How the Courts Can Solve It.According to the article, the "biggest" change in the Patent Reform Act of 2009 is "first to file": The biggest change: Patents would go to the first to file an application, rather than the first to invent, which is often hard to determine...
The demise of Encarta, and wikipedia, whither?
Posted on April 08, 2009Naomi Alderman wrote of the demise of Microsoft's Encarta:Wikipedia is not Encarta. The unanswerable force of the market has shown that most of us prefer a free and infinitely expandable source of knowledge, even if it's somewhat rough in patches, to a manicured, guarded encyclopedia we have to pay for...
Churchill jury: professorial plagiarism not a fire-able offense?
Posted on April 08, 2009Further to the Ward Churchill business at CU, InsideHigherEd has some discussion which includes the text:To find in Churchill's favor, the jury had to determine that his political views were a substantial or motivating factor in his dismissal, and that he would not have been fired but for the controversy over his opinions...
CAFC denies mandamus in Cypress Semiconductor
Posted on April 07, 2009The bottom line from the CAFC: To decide the question presented by this mandamus petition, we need only decide whether Cypress has shown that the Commission clearly and indisputably erred in ruling that the Commission may proceed with its investigation...
CAFC affirms BPAI decision in Kubin: obviousness found
Posted on April 07, 2009At issue was the question of whether the existence in the prior art of a purified protein, combined with "routine" cloning methods, renders obvious a claim to a nucleic acid encoding the protein. The patent applicants in the Kubin case lost for obviousness: For the reasons stated above,the Board did not err in finding appellants? claims obvious as a matter of law...
Ariad/MIT/Harvard smoked by CAFC in Lilly case
Posted on April 06, 2009Ariad/MIT/Harvard lost: Ariad sought and obtained the broad claims we now hold to be invalid. For its own reasons, Ariad maintained the breadth of these claims through claim construction and into trial. Although surviving an inequitable conduct charge, theacademics had patent claims which did not survive a written description challenge...
Earthquake prediction?
Posted on April 06, 2009Reuters ran a story about Gioacchino Giuliani, who predicted a major earthquake around L'Aquila weeks before it hit in April 2009, based on the presence of radon gas. **http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2223236/posts**Citing in the internet ageSources for Did You KnowIP Shift Happens
Ehrlich paper at Coalition for Patent Fairness: this dog won't hunt
Posted on April 06, 2009The Coalition for Patent Fairness website has a paper by Everett Ehrlich about "job loss" if the patent damages aren't reformed.LBE sent a comment to IAM:The "jobs issue" is an interesting one. A question for Dr. Ehrlich is "where" the jobs would be...
Churchill wins case against CU, and $1
Posted on April 05, 2009The Los Angeles Times discussed the victory of Ward Churchill over the University of Colorado:Jurors in the wrongful-termination lawsuit filed by Ward L. Churchill agreed with the embattled professor's contention that he was the victim of a "howling mob," not the perpetrator of academic misconduct...
Summers and conflicts and other dullness
Posted on April 05, 2009Politico raises some conflict issues concerning Lawrence Summers:Lawrence Summers, a top economic adviser to President Barack Obama, pulled in more than $2.7 million in speaking fees paid by firms at the heart of the financial crisis, including Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Merrill Lynch, Bank of America Corp...
Conflicts of interest: remembering the past?
Posted on April 05, 2009In a post on californiastemcellreport titled Angell, Corruption and Medical Research, Dave Jensen began:The former editor in chief of the New England Journal of Medicine weighed in on the ?smell of corruption? in medical research earlier this year in a piece that has some implications for the California stem cell agency...
It's the battery, stupid!
Posted on April 05, 2009Bob Park wrote on 3 April 2009:China says it plans to become the leading producer of hybrid and all electric vehicles. That's not good news for General Motors which aims to dig its way out of a hole by going more heavily into electric vehicles such as the plug-in Volt...
IBM to withdraw second patent application on outsourcing
Posted on April 05, 2009Christine Young writes in the recordonline:The same day the Times Herald-Record reported IBM had applied to patent a computerized system to help businesses outsource offshore jobs while maximizing government tax breaks, Big Blue did an about-face.The application "was filed in error and will be withdrawn," IBM spokesman Steve Malkiewicz said Monday, 30 March 09...
IAM on IBM's Kappos, not touching the political or patent pulse?
Posted on April 05, 2009Of the possibility of Kappos as USPTO Director, IAM wrote:That said, I would be very intrigued to see the reaction if Kappos gets the nod. IBM has spent the last few years courting the open source community. Back in 2007 Kappos himself proposed what he termed the European Interoperability Patent - a right granted to applicants on the basis that it would be freely available for others to use on payment of a reasonable royalty...
Hatch on Stevens: "he was screwed"
Posted on April 02, 2009WashingtonPost: After the news broke that the charges would be dropped, Stevens "sounded elated," said Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah). "Here's a guy who gave 60 years of service to this country, and he was screwed [by federal prosecutors]. . . . How does he get his reputation back?"Note to Senator Hatch: after 200+ years of service to this country, small inventors should not be screwed by "patent reform...
University solar patent smoked in Europe
Posted on April 02, 2009On 31 March, the EPO revoked a solar photovoltaic technology patent that had been issued to the University of Neuchatel and licensed exclusively to Oerlikon Corp.The patent holders had gone against users of the "SunFab" thin-film process.See also:http://ipbiz...
Kaminsky on Conficker
Posted on April 02, 2009Ars Technica wrote of containing Conficker:Based on what we've seen today, the answer is a very cautious "maybe." Conficker is awake and has been seen "in the wild" as various infected systems reached out to the control servers for data. New scanning technologies developed by Dan Kaminsky at Dox Para in cooperation with Felix Leder and Tillmann Werner have made it possible to detect a Conficker-infected system based on how it responds to certain queries...
S.515 working its way through Senate?
Posted on April 02, 2009ITBusinessEdge notes:Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania says:"I believe that we are on the brink of an accommodation here."One recalls that Sen. Specter put the brakes on S.1145 the last time patent reform was up:http://ipbiz.blogspot.com/2008/04/patent-reform-slip-sliding-away-arlen...
Stem cell therapy to grow bigger breasts?
Posted on April 02, 2009The TimesOnline had a post: Stem cells to grow bigger breasts, which includes text:The cells will be isolated from a woman?s spare fat, once it has been extracted from her thighs or stomach, using equipment owned by GE Healthcare, a technology company...
Global Patent Holdings loses appeal
Posted on April 02, 2009Global Patent Holdings, represented by Niro Scavone, lost an appeal at the CAFC.Elsewhere, in the stent wars, Cordis Corporation (?Cordis?) appeals, and Boston Scientific Corporation and Scimed Life Systems, Inc. (?Boston Scientific?) cross-appeal, from a final judgment of the United States District Court for the District of Delaware...
Digene loses appeal at CAFC
Posted on April 02, 2009Digene Corporation (?Digene?) appeals from the judgment of the United States District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin holding that Third Wave Technologies, Inc. (?Third Wave?) did not infringe the Digene patent in suit. Digene lost.Prosecution disclaimer arose -->See Spectrum Int?l, Inc...
CAFC interprets assignment contracts: ambiguity issue
Posted on April 02, 2009At issue in Euclid Chemical was ambiguity in the words in a patent assignment document:the Assignment provides: I, JACK BENNETT, whose full post office address is 10039 Hawthorne Drive, Chardon, Ohio 44024, in consideration for $25,000.00 and other good and valuable consideration, the receipt and sufficiency of which is hereby acknowledged do hereby sell and assign to VECTOR CORROSION TECHNOLOGIES LTD...
TomTom turns tail?
Posted on March 31, 2009One week after joining OIN, TomTom settled with Microsoft. Dana Blankenhorn at zdnet wrote:So that?s it, then. TomTom folded like a house of cards. See alsohttp://ipbiz.blogspot.com/2009/03/tomtom-joins-oin-on-march-23-2009.htmlhttp://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2344104,00...
IBM's published patent application 20090083107 on outsourcing
Posted on March 30, 2009Much is made of IBM's being the top recipient of issued US patents. Not so much is made of what is in the patents. Published US application 20090083107, titled METHOD AND SYSTEM FOR STRATEGIC GLOBAL RESOURCE SOURCING , is worthy of note.Paragraph 2 states:An important challenge in shifting to globally integrated enterprises is planning the location and capacity of the global workforce...
Bad lawyering for ColoradoU in Churchill mess?
Posted on March 30, 2009The Denver Post wrote of questioning of accused plagiarist Ward Churchill by a CU attorney:Patrick O'Rourke, a CU attorney, saw his questioning backfire at one point when he asked Churchill if he was really arguing that he didn't recognize the Cohen essay when he had edited it once before, for another book, just months earlier...
LA Times column rips California's CIRM
Posted on March 30, 2009In a column titled California stem cell program needs a new treatment, Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times takes a whack at California's CIRM, concluding Proposition 71 endowed the program with what looked like an embarrassment of riches. The danger is that, without better oversight and broader debate about its policies and goals, it will become simply an embarrassment...
In an alternate universe, maybe ...
Posted on March 29, 2009Law review article--> 58 Emory L.J. 181 (2008) LENGTH: 8029 words The Future of Law, Religion, and the Family A 25th Anniversary Symposium: sponsored by The Center for the Study of Law and Religion Emory University: Article and Essay: Is the Patent Office a Rubber Stamp? NAME: Mark A...
If we don't cite it, it doesn't exist?
Posted on March 29, 2009Footnote 14 of Lemley and Sampat's Emory "Rubber Stamp" states:For a nice analysis of the problem, see Bruce A. Kaser, Patent Application Recycling: How Continuations Impact Patent Quality & What the USPTO Is Doing About It, 88 J. Pat. & Trademark Off...
DOE head Chu proposes sharing of IP protection in some energy areas
Posted on March 28, 2009ANDREW C. REVKIN AND KATE GALBRAITH in dot earth ran a piece titled Energy Chief Seeks Global Flow of Ideas which included recent statements relating to DOE head Steven Chu:Some energy experts say that a lack of intellectual-property protection in China is a big impediment to advancing and disseminating designs for less-polluting power plants and the like...
Krivit on Park on "cold fusion"
Posted on March 28, 2009New Energy Times ran a piece on Bob Park titled: Bob Park Concedes: LENR is Real Science which included text in Park's WN:Incredibly, the American chemical Society was meeting in Salt Lake City this week and there were many papers on cold fusion, or as their authors prefer LENR (low-energy nuclear reactions)...
Do grade schoolers know that plagiarism is wrong?
Posted on March 27, 2009A column by Dave Schlencker on 27 March 09 observed:Condemning plagiarism is an easy saber to rattle. It's not a journalism thing; it's a common-sense thing. Grade-schoolers know better. And with the Internet, plagiarism is not only easy to do, it is easy to expose...
Churchill plagiarism investigation the flip side of Poshard story?
Posted on March 27, 2009Remember when defenders of SIU's Glenn Poshard complained about the manner in which Poshard's plagiarism came to light?Fast forward to March 2009 and see how Ward Churchill, a politically problematic plagiarist, is treated:And just because the misconduct investigation [of Churchill] grew out of the firestorm over the essay ? which CU later determined to be protected free speech ? didn?t mean the university could disregard the information it was getting about Churchill?s scholarship, [Michael] Carrigan testified...
Awards to Ocala Magazine rescinded after plagiarism revealed
Posted on March 26, 2009AFTER an anonymous source revealed plagiarism in articles written by Heather Lee of Ocala Magazine, THEN the North Central Florida Society of Professional Journalists Professional Chapter rescinded awards given for her work. The REAL STORY is why the North Central Florida Society of Professional Journalists Professional Chapter gave the awards in the first place...
"Cold fusion" hits ACS national meeting in Salt Lake City in March 2009
Posted on March 26, 2009There is a link to a press conference about a symposium at the American Chemical Society on LENR ("cold fusion"), which took place in Salt Lake City in March 2009.One talk was about the measurement of neutrons. This work arose from the Space Warfare Systems Center, San Diego (SWSCSD), and previous work had been presented at the APS in 2007...
Time to end patent examinations?
Posted on March 26, 2009The IAM blog had a post: Is it time to end patent examinations? which included text from Bowman Heiden:In the knowledge economy patents need to take on the role of building rather than blocking. To create such a world firms will need to focus more on developing their patents focused on business goals not bonus schemes, as well as spending a great deal of time understanding the patents of others...
What one learns at a conference can be held against one as to inequitable conduct
Posted on March 26, 2009The 271blog discusses Golden Hour Data Systems, Inc. v. emsCharts, E.D. Tex and writes:Shortly after the application was filed, the inventors and prosecution counsel received a brochure on the AeroMed system at a conference. The brochure indicated that the AeroMed system did indeed provide the features discussed in the application.
SIU plagiarism policy to be unveiled
Posted on March 25, 2009SIUDE noted: The committee charged with revising the university?s plagiarism policy is expected to release a final draft this week, administrators said Monday.If all goes to plan, the draft would be given to constituency groups this week and a final report be presented to the SIU Board of Trustees during its May 7 meeting...
"Law & Order" plotline follows Larry Mendte story
Posted on March 25, 2009The episode of "Law and Order" of 25 March 09 combined elements of Bernie Madoff with the Larry Mendte Philly Channel 3 email snooping.As an odd coincidence in timing, the Law & Order episode immediately preceded a Channel 10 story on Larry Mendte's house arrest.
Negligence case filed against law firms in E-Pass/Palm case
Posted on March 24, 2009Law.com noted:"In advising E-Pass to file and maintain their patent infringement claim, they spent $10 million in legal fees and costs without a sound basis to make the elemental case of patent infringement," said James Rosen of Rosen Saba, which filed the suit for E-Pass against its former lawyers at Moses & Singer and Squire Sanders.
900 year old book as prior art?
Posted on March 24, 2009Buried as a comment on a just-n-examiner post on books as prior art is the text:I use Google books search along with EAST/WEST, Google Scholar, and PubMed searches. Of course my art makes these databases readily useable. In fact just a couple of weeks ago I found some great prior art in a book that I would not have ever come across in any of my other searches...
TomTom joins OIN on March 23, 2009
Posted on March 23, 2009ComputerWorld noted:TomTom joined OIN on March 23. The OIN is an intellectual property company that was formed to promote Linux by using patents to create a collaborative ecosystem. Its members include IBM, Novell, Sony, and Red Hat.See also:http://ipbiz...
Confusion the origin of most plagiarism?
Posted on March 22, 2009Taking a leaf out of the Glenn Poshard / SIU notebook, Purdue chemistry professor George M. Bodner gives us:Confusion about what constitutes plagiarism ? not malicious intent ? is the leading cause of plagiarism at the graduate school level, according to an expert presenting here today [22 March 09] on the increasingly worrisome problem at the 237th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS)...
On predicting outcomes of CAFC decisions
Posted on March 22, 2009In December 2008, IPWatchDog wrote: It is hard to imagine that GlaxoSmithKline and Dr. Tafas could have drawn a better three judge panel then they did for this appeal of Judge Cacheris? ruling. The judges assigned to the panel hearing the case were Judges Rader, Bryson and Prost, who took turns laying it on the government attorney, USPTO General Counsel Toupin...
Survey on top law reviews
Posted on March 22, 2009Brian Leiter of the University of Chicago did a survey:So I've closed the survey, and, with 265 votes, the results for "the top 20" are below. I think it tells us not a lot about "quality," though a fair bit about "perceptions," which certainly isn't irrelevant for younger scholars...
Rickover and Bayh-Dole
Posted on March 20, 2009John Simpson wrote on californiastemcellreport:Of course taxpayers should benefit directly from the fruits of the research they have funded.This is not some harebrained, wacko leftist idea.Back when the Bayh-Doyle Act governing federal funding of research was being debated, Adm...
Tafas decided. Rule 78 is out, but ...
Posted on March 20, 2009The CAFC determined that the USPTO does get Chevron deference on procedural rules. Of course, what is a procedural rule?With the analytical framework established, we turn to whether the Final Rules are substantive or procedural. The parties agree that the USPTO has authority under § 2(b)(2) to promulgate procedural rules...
Larson v. Aluminart on inequitable conduct; has the time come for en banc review?
Posted on March 20, 2009This is a detailed case. Of some interest is the issue of failing to disclose to the USPTO Office Actions of the USPTO:We now come to Larson?s failure to disclose to the Reexamination Panel the Third and Fourth Office Actions from the ?039 Continuation...
TomTom goes after Microsoft with its own infringement action!
Posted on March 19, 2009Further to Microsoft's patent suit against TomTom, and Tim Lee's comment on the tough situation of TomTom, TomTom has sued Microsoft.From the now-infringement defendant, through Horacio Gutierrez, corporate vice president and deputy general counsel of Intellectual Property and Licensing, Microsoft Corporation :"We are reviewing TomTom's filing, which we have just received...
Data do not support an explosive growth of patent litigation
Posted on March 19, 2009Peter Zura at the 271Blog comments on recent data on IP litigation from the Judicial Business of the U.S. Courts:Claims of a patent litigation "explosion" continue to be unsupported by the latest data. Going back to 2004, the number of patent cases filed per year break down this way:2004 - 3,075 patent cases2005 - 2,720 patent cases2006 - 2,830 patent cases2007 - 2,896 patent cases2008 - 2,909 patent casesConsidering that 9,573 IP lawsuits were filed in 2008, patent litigation made up only 30% of all IP litigation...
Smith&Nephew whacks KCI vacuum bandage in Germany
Posted on March 18, 2009EarthTimes reports: Smith & Nephew Inc.'s Advanced Wound Management division announced that the German Federal Patent Court in Munich has held the Wake Forest patent for negative pressure (NPWT) licensed to Kinetic Concepts, Inc. invalid in Germany...
Catch-22 for TomTom?
Posted on March 18, 2009Tim Lee writes in a post about Micosoft/TomTom:A bit of background is helpful here. When the Free Software Foundation drafted version 2 of the GPL, it included a clause saying that if a vendor is forced to place restrictions on downstream redistribution of software covered by the GPL (due to a per-unit patent licensing agreement, for example), that vendor loses the right to distribute the software at all...
Worse than plagiarism
Posted on March 18, 2009Science News reports:In two investigative news stories, Adam Marcus describes the case against anesthesiologist Scott S. Reuben. This prominent Massachusetts pain researcher is accused of faking data that served as the basis for a minimum of 21 published medical studies...
Problem with Provigil?
Posted on March 17, 2009Yahoonews reports:A so-called "smart drug" popular with young people may carry more of an addiction risk than thought, a small government study suggests. Scans of 10 healthy men showed that the prescription drug Provigil caused changes in the brain's pleasure center, very much like potentially habit-forming classic stimulants...
CAFC reverses D Del on summary judgment findings in Crown Packaging
Posted on March 17, 2009This was a patent case in the area of ends for beverage cans: Crown and Rexam are both in the business of selling can ends and bodies to fillers associated with major beverage companies. The issue of "final judgment" arose: Even so, there must be a ?clear and unequivocal manifestation by the trial court of its belief that the decision made, so far as it is concerned, is the end of the case...
Broadcom charge on patent exhaustion against Qualcomm lacks specificity
Posted on March 17, 2009The San Diego Union-Tribune noted: Wireless giant Qualcomm said yesterday [March 16] that it scored a victory against rival Broadcom after a federal judge threw out a patent case that sought to upend Qualcomm's licensing business model.from IDG :Judge Hayes agreed with Qualcomm: "Although Broadcom acknowledges that Qualcomm possesses thousands of patents relating to wireless chipsets and handsets, Broadcom does not identify with any specificity the patents which it requests that the court declare exhausted," he wrote...
Microsoft switching to offense in patent litigation?
Posted on March 16, 2009John Fontana at network world writes that analyst firm Gartner said it has little doubt that Microsoft will switch to playing offense with its patent interests and that Microsoft is clearly ?beginning to treat its burgeoning patent portfolio as a revenue-generating business...
IAM blog re-cycling Lemley's "rational ignorance"?
Posted on March 16, 2009In a 15 March 09 post titled Is it time to end patent examinations?, the IAM blog (Joff Wild) shamelessly re-cycles the old Lemley-ism presented in "rational ignorance." Bo Heiden, the deputy director of the Centre for Intellectual Property, states:In the knowledge economy patents need to take on the role of building rather than blocking...
Roche to acquire Innovatis
Posted on March 16, 2009from GEN: Roche is taking over innovatis, a provider of automated cell analysis solutions, for ?15 million, or $19.56 million. The firm focuses on cell counting, viability testing, and cell function analysis in research as well as bioproduction.
Intellectual Ventures works on mosquito laser
Posted on March 15, 2009From ROBERT A. GUTH at careerjournal :Its [SDI, "Star Wars} rebirth as a bug killer came thanks to Nathan Myhrvold, a former Microsoft Corp. executive who now runs Intellectual Ventures LLC., a company that collects patents and funds inventions. His old boss, Mr...
Copying of a university website
Posted on March 15, 2009A story about the copying of the Brown University website revealed an interesting snag:Fortunately for UAH, Brown University takes an equally tolerant attitude towards the borrowed copyrighted code. According to Scott Turner, the Director of Web Communications at Brown University, his school ?viewed the similar designs as a compliment...
"Promoting intellectual discovery"
Posted on March 15, 2009The March 6, 2009 issue of Science has an article titled--> "Promoting Intellectual Discovery: Patents Versus Markets", written by Debrah Meloso, Jerney Copic, and Peter Bossaerts. Meloso is affiliated with Bocconi University in Milan (debrah.meloso atunibocconi...
Legal associates and law reviews
Posted on March 15, 2009Someone commented to an IPbiz post titled: Citations of blogs by law reviewsThis is part of the reason why, when I was an associate in BigLaw, I always had to suddenly go to the restroom whenever some partner said "We should write a law review article / white paper on that...
Lots of lawyers getting terminated
Posted on March 15, 2009Karen Sloan has a piece in the 16 March 09 NLJ titled: How Do Firms Lay Off Lawyers? Very Carefully , which includes the text:Layoffs can tarnish a firm's reputation and hurt recruitment, though experts say that stigma is fading, given that firm layoffs are now widespread...
Paul Hastings gets Rule 11 sanctions in patent case
Posted on March 14, 2009The NLJ gave some background:After losing a motion for a temporary restraining order, at which time Judge Pfaelzer raised questions about the patent's validity, ICU and its lawyers at Paul Hastings filed an amended complaint with new infringement claims...
James Greenwood on patent reform/stem cells
Posted on March 14, 2009James Greenwood in the Miami Herald:That's why the president and Congress must protect incentives for private investment into stem-cell research and the continued development of cures and therapies. Doing so requires that they pursue public policies that balance the need to increase access to today's medicines with the need to develop tomorrow's cures...
Harvard's Simon resigns over plagiarism
Posted on March 14, 2009Bloomberg noted on March 13: Dr. Lee Simon stepped down after the school completed a review of the charges of plagiarism, which began last year, Cameron said. Simon, a clinical professor of medicine at Harvard, also gave up his job at Beth Israel Deaconess, where he has not seen patients in at least a year, said Jerry Berger, a spokesman for the hospital...
Lithium ion battery from MIT
Posted on March 13, 2009DailyMail: The [MIT] researchers took a conventional electrode made from lithium iron phosphate and altered its surface structure so that ions were released and absorbed 100 times more quickly than normal.A prototype made using the new technique could be fully charged or discharged in just 10 to 20 seconds...
Natures Remedy case on accessibility of prior art
Posted on March 13, 2009From the case:?Accessibility goes to the issue of whether interested members of the relevant public could obtain the information if they wanted to.? Constant v. Advanced Micro- Devices, Inc., 848 F.2d 1560, 1568 (Fed. Cir. 1988). Thus, a reference will be deemed ?publicly accessible? if it: has been disseminated or otherwise made available to the extent that persons interested and ordinarily skilled in the subject matter or art, exercising reasonable diligence, can locate it and recognize and comprehend therefrom the essentials of the claimed invention without need of further research or experimentation...
The role of John Conyers in patent reform 2009?
Posted on March 13, 2009Text at betanews speaks to the damages apportionment issue in the "patent reform" movement:But the value of that patent in the modern market is determined by its defensibility -- literally, how much it can rake in, in infringement cases. Without that market value, much of the incentive for trying to build new technologies in the first place, may be lost...
TurnItIn pays profs (who praise) to attend conference
Posted on March 13, 2009In an article titled False Positives on Plagiarism , InsideHigherEd presented Texas Tech results suggesting the presence of "false positives" for plagiarism from TurnItIn.However, more interesting to IPBiz was the report that TurnItIn was paying for travel expenses for some profs to give papers...
What happens to stem cell patent applications from government funding?
Posted on March 13, 2009Not much mentioned in the March 9 hoopla over Obama and stem cells was the fact that the federal government had been funding stem cell research. Gerald Schatten, one-time collaborator with fraudster Hwang Woo Suk, was one of the biggest recipients of federal dollars...
What Wikipedia didn't tell you about Kanzius?
Posted on March 13, 2009Of the "burning water" discovery of John Kanzius, Wikipedia writes: The details of the process are still unreleased while Kanzius applies for a patent.In fact, Kanzius filed numerous patent applications on his rf machine and its applications. They are not doing well at the Patent Office...
Crazed inventor the villain of March 12 "Eleventh Hour"
Posted on March 12, 2009In an episode of the CBS show "Eleventh Hour" depicting models walking down runways, the villain turned out to be a technician who was ripped off by his boss for inventive credit for a perfume that functioned as an aphrodisiac, with (of course) some unfortunate side effects...
John Conyers and the ?Fair Copyright in Research Works Act?
Posted on March 12, 2009Controversy has arisen over HR 501, the ?Fair Copyright in Research Works Act.? Chattahbox writes: In truth the bill would eliminate public access to taxpayer funded research, and force scientists to only publish in journals. Prior to this bill, there has been a belief: if the taxpayer pays for the research, the taxpayer ought to have access to the results of the research...
Obviousness in interferences; Chapman and the 14- hydroxy problem in oxycodone
Posted on March 12, 2009The (nonprecedential) Chapman decision by the CAFC resolves an interference between Chapman et al. and Casner et al., in favor of Casner. The subject matter pertains to the synthesis of the drug oxycodone. An interesting aspect is that the panel majority and the dissent viewthe obviousness inquiry here in entirely different ways, with only the dissent (who would findNONOBVIOUSNESS as to Chapman) citing to KSR v...
PatenHawk praises Lemley, sort of
Posted on March 11, 2009In the post Jaw, PatentHawk (Gary Odom) wrote of Lemley's prepared testimony before the Senate on patent reform (S.515):However one may agree or disagree with Lemley, he has done his homework, and his stated positions are logical, if springing from flawed assumptions...
Interesting comment thread on Patently-O
Posted on March 11, 2009The comment thread to "law professors on the move" has a variety of observations, most totally unrelated to the current movements of certain law professors.Of the European "problem and solution" approach to the issue of obviousness:JAOI, there is a monumental thread from about 8 months ago, in this blog, in which I "took on all comers" on EPO-PSA (TSM)...
A Google search as a background check?
Posted on March 11, 2009In an article by David Margolick about the AutoAdmit case, one has the text:A Google search is the new universal background check and is unfettered, unfiltered, and nearly impossible to appeal. But not to manipulate. To ensure that their calumnies topped the Google cache, AutoAdmit posters filed multiple slurs about both women?a practice known as Google bombing?to crowd out or shove down anything else...
Seroquel and diabetes?
Posted on March 11, 2009AP reported on March 10:Attorneys for drug maker AstraZeneca are challenging the findings of medical experts who claim the company's anti-psychotic drug Seroquel causes diabetes.A Delaware judge began three days of hearings today to determine whether to allow testimony from three doctors in a case brought by a Kansas woman who claims that Seroquel caused her to develop diabetes...
Taxpayers are not venture capitalists
Posted on March 11, 2009Californiastemcellreport has text from the New York Times on California's CIRM, the state body which funds stem cell research:Pollack quoted Linda Iverson, a neuroscientist at the City of Hope, as saying at the hearing.?To use taxpayer money essentially as venture capital money is beyond the pale...
Testimony on patent reform (S.515)
Posted on March 10, 2009from prepared remarks by Philip S. Johnson, Chief Intellectual Property Counsel, Johnson & Johnson (who was one of six witnesses to testify on March 10 before the Senate Judiciary Committee on S. 515) , from a press release by Coalition for 21st Century Patent Reform:The primary focus of patent reform should be job growth...
Obviousness: European problem and solution approach
Posted on March 10, 2009MaxDrei, a commenter on Patently-O, asked if there were law review articles criticizing the European "problem & solution" approach [PSA] to the obviousness inquiry. [Specifically: Can anybody point me to a scholarly (we are on law professors, after all) demolition job done on EPO-PSA?]As background, a prior post by MaxDrei on Fire of Genius:What strikes me is the copious mention in them [cases on long felt need], of problems solved by the claimed subject matter, and technical effects at last achieved...
Photo of Lincoln in front of the White House?
Posted on March 10, 2009AP reports: A collector believes a photograph from a private album of Civil War Gen. Ulysses S. Grant shows President Abraham Lincoln in front of the White House and could be the last image taken of him before he was assassinated in 1865.If it is indeed Lincoln, it would be the only known photo of the 16th president in front of the executive mansion and a rare find, as only about 130 photos of him are known to exist...
Merck to buy Schering-Plough!
Posted on March 09, 2009MarketWatch reports: Pharmaceutical giant Merck & Co., Inc on March 9 said it will buy rival Schering-Plough for $41.1 billion in cash and shares to expand its presence in emerging markets and bolster its pipeline of potential new medicines.The two companies, which announced significant job cuts last fall, already are partners on the cholesterol drugs Zetia and Vytorin...
Followup on Garner and scientific plagiarism; resume inflation
Posted on March 09, 2009Relevant to the recent IPBiz post titled Scientific plagiarism on work by Harold Garner on plagiarism in science articles, one IPBiz reader raised a different issue, more about Garner himself.As background on this, recall that, although IPBiz takes a strong stance against plagiarism (repeatedly ridiculing the Harvard Business Review [HBR] text "plagiarize with pride"), IPBiz has always said that publishing false things does more damage to society than publishing true things, without giving credit to the original author...
Patently-O post "professors on the move" Sikahema'd?
Posted on March 09, 2009In the post Patent law academics make troll studies a growth industry, IPBiz linked to a March 9 post on Patently-O www.patentlyo.com/patent/2009/03/patent-law-professors-on-the-move.htmlIt might appear that the Patently-O post is gone. [UPDATE: the post seems to be back...
Patent law academics make troll studies a growth industry
Posted on March 09, 2009On February 1, 2009, Gwendolyn G. Ball and Jay P. Kesan wrote a paper posted on SSRN titled Transaction Costs and Trolls: Strategic Behavior by Individual Inventors, Small Firms and Entrepreneurs in Patent Litigation. The abstract noted:Using original court documents to accurately identify the parties, outcomes and disputed patents in cases filed in 2000 and 2002, we explore how the resolution of patent cases relates to the nature of the parties...
Scientific plagiarism
Posted on March 08, 2009Chronicle noted of a report by Harold Garner discussed in Science: The survey published in Science, while anonymous, prompted 83 internal investigations at scientific journals, which in turn led to 43 cases in which an article was retracted.ScienceNews discussed the article in Science on plagiarism:Suppose author #1 reported that in a few experimental trials, drug therapy worked as well as surgery...
Barclays predicts Merck beats Teva on Singulair.
Posted on March 08, 2009Globes said that Barclays Capital noted, "Based on testimony offered and the tone of the proceedings, in our view the most likely outcome is that Merck's patent no. 5,565,473 will be upheld should there be no out-of-court settlement (which remains a possibility)...
Scott Harris smoked. Also, State Street alive, sort of.
Posted on March 08, 2009The beginning of the CAFC decision states:Lewis Ferguson, Darryl Costin and Scott C. Harris (collectively, ?Applicants?) appeal from the final decision of the Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences (?Board?) sustaining the rejection of all sixty-eight claims of their U...
Calgon loses in CAFC appeal of re-exams
Posted on March 08, 2009The CAFC, in a decision with Judge Posner was sitting by designation, affirmed the BPAI and Calgon lost.90/006,411 and 90/006,881
Invalid to one, invalid to all. Collateral estoppel in patent cases.
Posted on March 08, 2009The decision in O2Micro v. Taiwan Sumida is short, and rather basic. The punchline is:This court held in Mendenhall v. Barber-Greene Co., 26 F.3d 1573, 1577 (Fed. Cir. 1994) that ?once the claims of a patent are held invalid in a suit involving one alleged infringer, an unrelated party who is sued for infringement of those claims may reap the benefit of the invalidity decision under principles of collateral estoppel...
Kanzius IP concerns patent applications, not issued patents
Posted on March 08, 2009An editorial in the News-Press on March 7, 2009 writes of the Kanzius patent applications as if they were issued patents:Kanzius? widow, Marianne, the new owner of the patents protecting the treatment, has expressed interest in continuing conversations with Lee Memorial Health System CEO Jim Nathan about the invention...
2009 law review article on patent damages
Posted on March 07, 2009David W. Opderbeck writes on patent law damages in the article PATENT DAMAGES REFORM AND THE SHAPE OF PATENT LAW, 89 B.U.L. Rev. 127 (2009), the same review that brought us the horror of "Ending Abuse...".The conclusion states:The debate over patent damages reform is in reality a fight over the fundamental nature of the patent grant...
Merges/Kuhn not on same page with Bessen/Meurer
Posted on March 07, 2009Robert P. Merges and Jeffrey M. Kuhn expound on the imprecision of patent claims in 97 Calif. L. Rev. 1 (2009). Footnote 8 states:See generally ADAM B. JAFFE & JOSH LERNER, INNOVATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS: How OUR BROKEN PATENT SYSTEM IS ENDANGERING INNOVATION AND PROGRESS, AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT (Princeton Univ...
TomTom denies Microsoft's patent infringement assertions
Posted on February 26, 2009DowJones reported: Dutch navigations solutions company TomTom NV said Feb. 26 it rejects all Microsoft Corp.'s claims that it is infringing on eight of its patents.Microsoft Corp. said Feb. 25 that it filed patent-infringement claims in a federal court for the Western District of Washington in the U...
CNET trashes Intellectual Ventures
Posted on February 26, 2009Matt Asay wrote:When I negotiate contracts with customers, intellectual-property indemnification is always the top legal concern. Always.But it's not because of Microsoft and its recent TomTom patent lawsuit, or other such infringement suits between vendors...
CIRM spending lots of money on lawyers
Posted on February 26, 2009Californiastemcellreport noted on Wed., Feb. 25:Next Thursday, the Governance Subcommittee of the CIRM board of directors is expected to increase payments for its main outside counsel, Remcho, Johansen & Purcell, of San Leandro, Ca., and also for Nancy Koch, who deals with intellectual property issues...
Automobile not invented in America, but ...
Posted on February 25, 2009SecuringInnovation bashed Obama for suggesting the automobile was invented by Americans.But, then, there is this text on Securing Innovation -->Steinmetz secured 200 patents in his lifetime and advocated the creation of an affordable electric automobile that would sell for less than $1,000 and could compete with gasoline powered cars like the Model T Ford and the costly Detroit Electric, an electric car created by the Anderson Electric Car Co...
LATimes quotes Lemley in anti-Bilski piece
Posted on February 24, 2009In a piece titled "Patent rules out of date," the LA Times wrote:Neither the patent appeals board nor the federal court ruled that business methods can't be patented, but patent attorneys fear that will be the end result as few would pass the revised test...
Former guv Locke pick for Commerce
Posted on February 24, 2009WaPo reports: Former Washington governor Gary Locke is likely to be President Obama's choice to head the Commerce Department, according to several administration officials briefed on the decision.WaPo did NOT mention the USPTO in its story, but did note:The Commerce Department's stated mission is to promote U...
Lying, even when technically plagiarism, is still lying
Posted on February 24, 2009A post on examiner.com by Laura Smith-Proulx made a straightforward comment about copying from someone else's resume:It happens all the time - your friend has the same job, and you swipe a few sentences from his resume. While this is technically plagiarism, there's worse news for anyone who does this: your friend's resume ISN'T about you...
Facebook fiasco: overzealous lawyering?
Posted on February 23, 2009The Consumerist blog wrote of Facebook: "Facebook's New Terms of Service: 'We Can Do Anything We Want With Your Content. Forever.' " [Facebook has since rolled back the changes]ComputerWorld wrote: Was that what Facebook had in mind with the change in terms? Probably not...
Fast Company pushes peer-to-patent
Posted on February 23, 2009FastCompany writes: Researchers at the Center for Technology Assessment hope to use that insight to clear out the enormous blacklog of U.S. patent applications, which is stifling American innovation simply because inventors must wait so long to get their patents approved and be assured of their intellectual property...
Ranking of patent blogs
Posted on February 23, 2009Back in 2006, IPBiz noted:Returning to the central theme, bloggers are not evaluated on the accuracy of what they write, but who links to them. Linking may relate to approval at some level, but it is hardly analogous to peer review. Peer review, to first order, is about the plausibility of the logic, not about whether the underlying experiments are accurate...
Inventor John Kanzius dies
Posted on February 22, 2009The inventor John Kanzius, made famous by an interview with Lesley Stahl on "60 Minutes," died on February 18, 2009. See Colleague: Honor Kanzius by supporting research: Sharon McDonald calls Kanzius' radio frequency technology that destroys cancer cells without any significant side effects, one of the most remarkable breakthroughs in cancer treatment...
The hippest template for shameless plagiarism?
Posted on February 22, 2009Speaking about the iriver spinn, Gizmodo writes:Looks like the iriver Spinn is the hippest template for shameless plagiarism these days. Not one but two devices, a camera and a PMP, have popped up with obvious "inspiration" from iriver's '70s-influenced baby...
Blogging as antidote to Sikahema effect?
Posted on February 22, 2009In December 2008, there was a back-and-forth between Joe Mullin and Gary Odom (aka Patent Hawk) about Odom's patent infringement suit against Microsoft, then in ED Texas.At the bottom of the Mullin post was the text:Update: Gary Odom responds to this story...
Remembering URochester and the COX-2 patent litigation
Posted on February 22, 2009IPBiz got a chuckle out of post at Patent Baristas:Mark Lemley, Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, seems to distinguish universities from trolls on the premise that universities (generally) do not lie in wait until an industry has developed around a technology and then demanding a disproportionate share of royalties based on irreversible investments...
Masnick and Lemley-isms
Posted on February 22, 2009In a post titled How Reporters Contribute To Misconceptions About Patent Lawsuits, Mike Masnick uses Joe Mullin as a cover for some previous fuzzy thinking by Lemley and Cotropia. Masnick should have at least credited Lemley and Cotropia for their idea...
CBS Sunday Morning on Feb. 22 on Shepard Fairey matter
Posted on February 22, 2009On 22 Feb 09, CBS Sunday Morning had a piece on Shepard Fairey, including mention of the Obama Hope poster. CBS was way behind on its facts, neglecting to mention that Lemley's law firm had brought a DJ action on behalf of Shepard Fairey against AP. Also didn't mention issue of "who owns" the copyright in the picture...
"Fire of genius" speech and Google Books
Posted on February 22, 2009With the 200th anniversary of Lincoln's birth, there were a lot of articles on Lincoln in February 2009. One was "Presidents who value science," by James J. McCarthy, which appeared in 323 Science 853 (13 Feb. 09). There was an allusion to Lincoln's "fire of genius" speech, well-known to patent attorneys and the inspiration for the name of a blog, which has the text:"The patent system added the fuel of interest to the fire of genius, in the discovery and production of new and useful things...
Agreements over genetically modified seeds limiting research?
Posted on February 22, 2009Andrew Pollack in the NYT has a piece titled Crop Scientists Say Biotechnology Seed Companies Are Thwarting Research which includes the text:?No truly independent research can be legally conducted on many critical questions,? the scientists wrote in a statement submitted to the Environmental Protection Agency...
Cloning in Korea. Hwang's patent applications back in business?
Posted on February 19, 2009Still gun-shy from the Hwang Woo Suk fiasco, the South Korean government is moving slowly on a request by K. Y. Cha and affiliates. The Korea Times reported on Feb. 5, 2009:After a lengthy meeting Thursday, the National Bioethics Committee decided to delay its decision over whether to allow the Seoul-based Cha Medical Center to conduct research on embryonic stem cells created from cloned human embryos...
"Disruptive innovation" and lawyers don't mix
Posted on February 19, 2009Jackie Hutter invokes buggy whips numerous times in a post about legal billing, including in text wherein a misplaced modifier relates Jackie to buggy whip manufacturers:Like buggy whip manufacturers, I believe that many lawyers have become so entrenched in the law firm business that they have effectively forgotten that they are first legal services providers...
Apotex and Olivieri
Posted on February 19, 2009Patent lawyers are familiar with the name Apotex in a Hatch-Waxman context.Another area concerns science fraud. From an abstract by Rhodes:The Olivieri/Apotex affair is just another instance of academic medicine?s dereliction in a case of scientific fraud and misconduct...
Google would rather "fight than settle" in patent litigation
Posted on February 18, 2009Bloomberg reports: Google Inc. is going on the offensive to fight patent claims, a strategy the Internet-search company says will deter frivolous lawsuits.The number of patent challenges against Google rose to 14 last year, from 11 in 2007 and three in 2006...
High energy physics on race for Higgs boson
Posted on February 17, 2009The BBC reported on the race to discover the Higgs boson:Cern and Fermilab officials squared up at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting in Chicago.Echoing themes in so-called races to patent, one had the quote:"It's a race...
Of boat rockers and mattresses
Posted on February 16, 2009Sam Martin wrote on CNET:I?m no patent expert, but it?s clear after a little research that patent laws were put into place for two reasons: 1) they want to encourage secretive inventors to stop stashing their cool ideas under a mattress somewhere and make them public and 2) they want to rock the boat...
Crock pots and energy
Posted on February 16, 2009Crock pots seem to be coming back. The following contains some commentary:**from green yahoo: Save Energy Crock-Pots, particularly today's models, are energy-sippers compared to most other cooking methods like a traditional oven, stove-top, or toaster oven...
More on Suppes and Missouri
Posted on February 15, 2009The Baltimore Sun ran, on Feb. 15, a version of an AP story on Galen Suppes that had circulated as early as February 7.Neither variant gets into the issue that some of Galen Suppes' work, now at issue at Missouri, may have derived from work Suppes did at Kansas, and, as such, would be beyond the purview of Missouri's reach, barring an explicit assignment on the point...
Earthquake hits New Jersey on Valentine's Day
Posted on February 15, 2009NBCNewYork reported: The latest earthquake, with a magnitude of 2.2, was recorded shortly before 5:30 p.m. Saturday [Feb. 14], said Scott DiGiralomo, a coordinator with the county's office of emergency management. He told The Star-Ledger of Newark that the quake's epicenter was about 6 miles north of Boonton, and it was felt in neighboring Montville...
More on Leapfrog and secondary considerations
Posted on February 14, 2009From Leapfrog Enterprises, 485 F.3d 1157, 1162 (CAFC 2007):Finally, we do not agree with Leapfrog that the court failed to give proper consideration to secondary considerations. The district court explicitly stated in its opinion that Leapfrog had provided substantial evidence of commercial success, praise, and long-felt need, but that, given the strength of the prima facie obviousness showing, the evidence on secondary considerations was inadequate to overcome a final conclusion that claim 25 would have been obvious...
"Top 50" in biofuels according to Biofuels Digest
Posted on February 14, 2009'The 50 Hottest Companies in Bioenergy' according to Biofuels Digest on 22 Dec 08:1. Coskata2. Sapphire Energy3. Virent Energy Systems4. POET5. Range Fuels6. Solazyme7. Amyris Biotechnologies8. Mascoma9. DuPont Danisco10. UOP11. ZeaChem12. Aquaflow Bionomic13...
Warner-Lambert and Listerine
Posted on February 14, 2009Jeopardy on 14 Feb 09 seemed to suggest Listerine was invented at Johnson and Johnson. As wikipedia points out: First formulated by Dr. Joseph Lawrence and Jordan Wheat Lambert in 1879 as a surgical antiseptic, it was given to dentists for oral care in 1895 and it was the first over-the-counter mouthwash sold in the United States in 1914...
Something in Nyce matter?
Posted on February 14, 2009Internet searches on a new trial for Jonathan Nyce are making the rounds.See alsohttp://ipbiz.blogspot.com/2006/01/bayh-dole-act-and-murder-case-of.html
"Post Issue Peer to Patent" involved in Red Hat matter
Posted on February 14, 2009On Red Hat and IP Innovation, from OS News :Back in 2007, IP Innovation filed a lawsuit against Red Hat and Novell. IP Innovation is a subsidiary of Acacia Technologies. You may have heard of them -- they're reported to be the most litigious patent troll in the USA, meaning they produce nothing of value other than money from those whom they sue (or threaten to sue) over patent issues...
Rick Weiss tackles the challenge of patent reform
Posted on February 12, 2009The first paragraph of Weiss's report in Science Progress, directed to the Obama administration and Congress on the topic of patent reform:Large-scale investment in science and technology could simultaneously help jump-start the flagging economy and generate solutions to the pressing problems of climate change, sustainable energy, and national security...
Sun-Times on Lincoln on his 200th
Posted on February 12, 2009On 12 Feb. 09, the Chicago Sun-Times had a story including the text:A new book, Fighting Slavery in Chicago by Tom Campbell, recounts how Lincoln, in a couple of cases, represented slave owners as a young lawyer.In one 1847 case, a man named Robert Matson brought a group of slaves, including Jane Bryant and her children, to Illinois from Kentucky to help plant crops...
Lemley law firm plays litigation hardball with AP over Fairey Obama Hope poster
Posted on February 12, 2009Mark Lemley's new law firm, Durie Tangri Lemley Roberts & Kent, has wasted no time in taking a whack at Associated Press (AP), in filing a declaratory judgment action in the Shepard Fairey matter involving the Obama Hope poster. IPBiz had earlier suggested that the parties might resolve the issue, but Lemley's firm is playing litigation hardball...
"Mutually assured destruction" in patent litigation viewed as a porcupine fight
Posted on February 12, 2009Palm chief Ed Colligan on a possible fight between Apple and Palm over the Pre and patents:It's like two little porcupines going around, and you don't want to touch each other because you might get stung. You peacefully coexist and everything's OK and you keep working together...
Gregg gone at Commerce
Posted on February 12, 2009Yahoo news noted:Republican Sen. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire abruptly withdrew his nomination as commerce secretary Thursday [Feb 12], the third Cabinet-level pick scuttled. The move left President Barack Obama without a full team to lead the government...
Financial guys and patents
Posted on February 12, 2009From tradingmarkets:David Stewart states in his report: "The software really is dynamic. But, again, the important thing is that it's also heavily patented and the patent has been so heavily infringed on that triple damages are now being sought. If the adage is true, if "imitation really is the sincerest form of flattery", then the same thing could probably be said of plagiarism or even the outright piracy of an intellectual property...
Bailout for biotech?
Posted on February 12, 2009Fierce Pharma has an opinion piece by Daniel J. Nevrivy, Ph.D. the founder of Nevrivy Patent Law Group, :The global financial crisis and economic downturn has created a world of extraordinary government intervention in markets and industry, unthinkable even a year ago...
WSJ on compulsory licensing, China-style
Posted on February 11, 2009WSJ writes:In other ways, however, the Third Amendment [of Chinese patent law] takes a wrong turn. One of the worst offenses comes in provisions for compulsory licenses. These support expansive authority for the state to issue licenses, without the approval of the patent holder, to anyone who is able to produce the product once given access to the patented technology...
Microsoft obtains 10,000th US patent
Posted on February 10, 20097th space reports:The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office recently awarded Microsoft Corp. its 10,000th U.S. patent. The invention, U.S. Patent No. 7,479,950, applies to surface computing technology and outlines how users can place real objects ? anything from cell phones to their own fingers ? on the computer?s tablelike display and the computer will automatically identify the objects and track their position, orientation and motion...
Sacramento Bee says nuts to Vacaville's Nut Tree
Posted on February 10, 2009The Sacramento Bee on 10 Feb 09 went after an historical inaccuracy at Vacaville's Nut Tree:Vacaville's Nut Tree, a famed tourist site that has been recast into a more commercial vein in recent years, has hung a series of banners that highlight celebrities who have visited...
Ranking lobbyists? Who's the best at ?finding, grinding, and minding??
Posted on February 10, 2009Internet posts with rankings are good for getting hits. IPBiz ran across this 2007 article from the Washington Post on ranking lobbyists. There's some interesting text within.Of lawyers, lobbying, and advertising:Legal Times recently listed 50 firms with revenues of more than $7 million a year...
Article One announces prize award concerning US 6,784,873
Posted on February 10, 2009Article One announced award of a $50K prize for art (potentially) invalidating U.S. Patent No. 6,784,873 (relevant to accused infringer Garmin). There were two pieces of art, and the split was 35/15.A press release noted:The Study was won by Article One community members, called Advisors, from the United States...
CAFC finds TSM test still exists, sort of
Posted on February 09, 2009The CAFC wrote in Ball Aerosol vs. Limited Brands:The disagreement between the parties?and the sole basis for the district court?s denial of Limited?s motion for summary judgment of obviousness?is whether a motivation to combine the prior art existed...
It's about damages stupid
Posted on February 09, 2009Further to an IPBiz comment on the Rooklidge paper ["S.1145 stumbled over apportionment of damages. That's the issue. The other stuff was window-dressing. Yes, the courts changed some things. But the real issue remains."], note text in a Reuters report on February 9:A bill to overhaul the U...
Rooklidge's "Reform of a Fast-Moving Target"
Posted on February 08, 2009A paper written by William C. Rooklidge on patent reform was presented at meetings of the AIPLA and ACPC, and is getting some press. "Reform of a Fast-Moving Target: The Development of Patent Law Since the 2004 National Academies Report" examines the major issues and changes that have occurred in the patent system since the NAS report in 2004...
Vizio issues press release on re-exam of US 5,329,369
Posted on February 08, 2009The release states: VIZIO, Inc. announced today [Feb. 6] that the U.S. Patent Office has issued a second rejection of all claims in Funai Electric Co.'s United States Patent No. 5,329,369.