Patent Law

Burying a reference as violation of 37 C.F.R. § 11.18(b)?

Posted on December 02, 2008
Patently-O mentions the USPTO's Harry Moatz on possible violations of 37 C.F.R. § 11.18(b):Mr. Moatz provides several examples that could be seen as failure to make a reasonable inquiry: (1) Filing an application with claims that are anticipated by at least one publication authored by one of the inventors...

David Gregory to replace Russert on MTP?

Posted on December 02, 2008
Politico says: NBC News plans to name David Gregory as moderator of ?Meet the Press,? infusing one of television?s most prized franchises with a sharp edge leavened by a youthful style and versatility, according to network executives.

Medegen gets a remand in plug case

Posted on December 02, 2008
Medegen put out a press release on Dec 2:Medegen, a leading innovator in infusion therapy medical products, announced today that it has won an important legal victory in the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, D.C. The appellate court's decision reverses a judgment issued by a district court judge in the Central District of California of patent non-infringement entered in favor of ICU Medical Inc...

Medicis does deal with Impax over Solodyn

Posted on December 02, 2008
Forbes noted that Medicis shares were higher after a deal with Impax over the Hatch-Waxman challenge to acne drug Solodyn.An interesting comment in the story: "...the payment to Impax may "raise eyebrows" from regulatory agencies, he added, though it appears structured as part of the broader partnership...

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Mylan, Novartis settle Hatch-Waxman case on Femara

Posted on December 02, 2008
Details of the settlement are confidential, but Mylan stated it will market a generic version of Femara before the patent expires.A press release on tradingmarkets stated: Generic drugmaker Mylan said that under the agreement it had a patent licence allowing it to market its Letrozole tablets prior to the expiry of a U...

BlackBoard tries to terminate re-exam of its patent

Posted on December 02, 2008
The Washington Business Journal notes that BlackBoard has filed suit in the ED Va against the USPTO (and Director Jon Dudas) to stop the inter partes re-examination of its patent:The complaint Blackboard filed on Nov. 21, 2008 in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia argues that the PTO?s decision to continue its re-examination after the court decided the patent was not invalid and Desire2Learn had infringed was improper...

WARF responds to EPO/EBA decision on stem cell patent application

Posted on December 01, 2008
WARF said of the EPO decision:?The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) is disappointed in the decision of the Enlarged Board of Appeal of the European Patent Office (EPO) rejecting the claims of WARF's European Patent Application No. 96903521...

The meaning of Part VI of Abbott v. Sandoz on injunctions

Posted on December 01, 2008
In a post titled Whaling , the PatentHawk blog focusses on the injunction standards enumerated in the case Abbott Labs v. Sandoz,2008 U.S. App. LEXIS 21880 , decided on Oct. 21, and arrives at a punchline:The combined signal from Munaf, Abbott and Winter mark a shift from the injunction chill of eBay, and earlier repeated statements from the Supreme Court that patent preliminary injunctive relief is an extraordinary remedy requiring a clear showing...

Qualcomm smoked at CAFC. Jaffe and Lerner really got it wrong.

Posted on December 01, 2008
The CAFC opinion began:This patent infringement case involves the consequence of silence in the face of a duty to disclose patents in a standards-setting organization (?SSO?). The district court concluded that Qualcomm breached its duty to disclose U...

Ancient US patent invalid over prior public use?

Posted on November 30, 2008
The Chicago Tribune re-reported a story from the Freeport Standard about LeBaron & Miller Interiors taking over a store once occupied by E & W Clothing House, which had a a "cash railway" or "cash carrier system." In this system, customers paid the clerk for their merchandise at the counter, after which the clerk grasped a small metal box or tube from a wire over his head, deposited the ticket and cash inside, pulled a cord that sent it sailing up a wire to a cashier on a balcony...

Bob Park roasts cold fusion, again

Posted on November 30, 2008
In his Oct. 28 post, Bob Park wrote:It's been almost 20 years since the March 23, 1989 announcement that cold fusion had been discovered by two chemists at the University of Utah. By June, cold fusion was an object of ridicule. A small band of embattled defenders retreated to holding annual conferences of like-minded scientists to which skeptics were not welcome...

Azam Amir Kasab

Posted on November 30, 2008
An initial report in the Daily Mail concerning captured Mumbai terrorist Azam Amir Kasab reveals some interesting points:--> the terrorists captured the Indian fishing trawler bearing the name Kuber, and utilized it to get to Mumbai.--> the Indian coast guard actually intercepted the (captured) Kuber: On November 23, after reaching Porbandar in the Indian state of Gujarat, 310 nautical miles from Mumbai, the insurgents were intercepted by two coastguard officers...

Great Domain Name on Laurie articles

Posted on November 30, 2008
The blog Great Domain Name - An Invention and Intellectual Property Blog has a recent post invoking "patent troll tracker":A report co-authored by Ron Laurie titled ?A Summary of Established & Emerging Business Models? (courtesy of Patent Troll Tracker) was instrumental to my understanding of these business models...

"Assessing a country as a relocation option"

Posted on November 30, 2008
Note Bank of America's published patent application 20080103804 (11/923186, filed 24 Oct. 2007), titled COUNTRY ASSESSMENT, first claim:A method, comprising:selecting a country;analyzing country data relating to the country;generating at least one category relating to the country;generating a reward score for the country based at least in part on the country data and the at least one category; andgenerating a risk score for the country based at least in part on country data and the at least one category...

Patents a big deal in nanotech?

Posted on November 30, 2008
In a mindless piece titled proposed intellectual property model for nanotechnology, nanowerk wrote:Stanford Law School researcher Mark Lemley said in a 2005 study entitled Patenting Nanotechnology that ??patents will cast a larger shadow over nanotech than they have over any other modern science at a comparable stage of development...

Fairchild sues Infineon over power management patents

Posted on November 30, 2008
EETimes reports: Fairchild Semiconductor is suing Infineon Technologies AG in the U.S. District Courts of Maine and Delaware, claiming some of the German group's CoolMOS and OptiMOS power management devices, as well as its Infineon IGBT and CanPak parts, infringe one or more of eight Fairchild patents...

Plagiarism by Korean students at US universities?

Posted on November 30, 2008
The JoongAng Daily reports:According to a study submitted by Korean scholar Dr. Samuel Kim to Columbia University last summer, 44 percent of the 1.5 and second-generation Korean Americans who entered high-level U.S. universities dropped out of school halfway through...

Genetic test to predict sports ability?

Posted on November 30, 2008
The IHT reported:In health-conscious, sports-oriented Boulder, Colorado Atlas Sports Genetics is playing into the obsessions of parents by offering a $149 test that aims to predict a child's natural athletic strengths. The process is simple. Swab inside the child's cheek and along the gums to collect DNA and return it to a lab for analysis of ACTN3, one gene among more than 20,000 in the human genome...

Ten places to see before you die. Again.

Posted on November 29, 2008
Lists are hot items for getting internet hits. Now and then, yahoo gives a list of 10 places to go before you die. You better plan on living, because the members of the list keep changing. The current list includes:1. San Francisco de Asis Church, Ranchos de Taos, N...

PatentSurf identifies US Patents meeting a description

Posted on November 29, 2008
The site states: This site empowers you to surf patents made available by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office.As a starting point, please type a natural description of what you are interested in.Patents that are related to your description will be presented for your review.

Australian sniper?

Posted on November 29, 2008
A website in Australia [Searchable Networked Intellectual Property Electronic Resource . aka SNIPER] keeps track of publications concerning US patent law, and includes the following entry for the month September 2004: SNIPER number: 2004/01323 Author: Ebert, Lawrence B...

Privacy rights in blood?

Posted on November 29, 2008
AP notes: The Havasupai tribe of nothern Arizona, whose isolated village lies deep in a gorge off the Grand Canyon, claims Arizona State University and University of Arizona researchers misused blood samples taken from more than 200 tribal members for diabetes research in the 1990s by also using it for research into schizophrenia, inbreeding and ancient population migration...

Legal blogging and Twitter

Posted on November 29, 2008
from the UCL practitioner:Legal Pad, the blog of CalLaw.com, debates the merits of Twitter for lawyers and provides a link to a list of over 300 "absolute-must-follow lawyer-twitterers." I first learned about Twitter at BlogHer 2007 in Chicago, and I created a Twitter account, but its utility for lawyers I confess remains beyond me...

Intellectual Ventures on appeal rules

Posted on November 29, 2008
In its letter to the USPTO on the proposed appeal rules, Intellectual Ventures noted: Intellectual Ventures typically employs firms in the upper quartiles of the spectrum for work involving complex issues and risks...the AIPLA third quartile billing rate for associates in San Francisco in 2006 was $413 [ per hour]...

Geron comments on EPO/EBA decision on stem cell patent application

Posted on November 28, 2008
Geron reported in a press release:The EPO decision upholds the rejection of WARF's claims as being impermissible under a rule of the European Patent Convention that prohibits the patenting of inventions which concern "the uses of human embryos for industrial or commercial purposes"...

Plagiarism in New Zealand

Posted on November 28, 2008
stuff.co.nz reported: Radio New Zealand has pulled Noelle McCarthy off air until Boxing Day after an inquiry uncovered fresh cases of suspected plagiarism. (...) Items on octopuses, Halloween and Wimbledon fashion drew heavily on articles printed in British newspapers...

Wal-Mart worker trampled to death on Black Friday

Posted on November 28, 2008
The Daily News reported: A Wal-Mart worker died after being trampled when hundreds of shoppers smashed through the doors of a Valley Stream Long Island store on Nov. 28, 2008. "He was bum-rushed by 200 people," said Jimmy Overby, 43, a co-worker. "They took the doors off the hinges...

European report attacks pharma patenting practices

Posted on November 28, 2008
A blog at the Wall Street Journal noted:The report cites a number of strategies pharma uses to hold onto exclusivity.A ?patent thicket,? also known as a patent cluster, consists of hundreds of different patents filed across Europe on a single drug, with some patents coming late in the drug?s life cycle...

Robots.txt at the USPTO

Posted on November 28, 2008
Patently-O wrote:The BPAI opinions are stored on the site http://des.uspto.gov. Unfortunately that site is not crawled by web indexes such as Google or Yahoo. The problem is that the site includes a "robots.txt" file that excludes such activity. See http://des...

"It's a sign of the times"

Posted on November 28, 2008
Petula Clark's "It's a sign of the times" contains the line:And a year ago I never could have seen itIPBiz notes the following from a press release by the law firm of Gardner Groff Greenwald & Villanueva, P.C.:In January 2009, the firm will take the following steps:? Fee Reduction...

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