Patent Law

Plagiarism indifference?

Posted on November 18, 2008
AssociatedContent refers to another website for:According to the site, 81.8% of questioned Obama supporters didn't know about Joe Biden's plagiarism scandal in the 80's. 88.4% didn't know of Obama's comments about the coal industry, and 56.1% didn't know of the charge that Obama kicked off his career at Bill Ayers' house...

Medtronic 3Q net $571M, but 3Q law expenses $266M

Posted on November 18, 2008
Bloomberg reported Medtronics net income dropped to $571 million, or 51 cents a share, in the quarter [Q3, 2008], from $666 million, or 58 cents, a year earlier, the Minneapolis company said today in a statement. Profit excluding litigation expenses and other items was 67 cents a share, missing analysts' estimates by four cents...

Hiearchies in Google: Hwang Woo Suk. Then or now?

Posted on November 18, 2008
A Google search on Hwang Woo Suk on 18 Nov 08 yielded 177,000 hits, with #2:10 Questions For Dr. Hwang Woo Suk: South Korean cloning pioneer Hwang Woo Suk admitted last month that his lab accepted human egg donations from two of its own researchers, a violation of scientific ethics...

Patent attorney fee won't be collected till Spring 2009

Posted on November 18, 2008
LBE had a nice talk with Harry I. Moatz about the new fee imposed by § 11.8(d). The first order of business seems to be to collect current addresses for everyone, and you can get ahead of the game by making sure your address on the roster is accurate...

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Perfect storm for raising patent application fees?

Posted on November 17, 2008
Some time ago, Reed Hundt, a Clinton appointee and Obama insider, suggested:For a set dollar amount--say, $500,000--a firm ought to be able to buy a guarantee that its patent application will be reviewed and accepted or rejected within one year. Hundt also recommended dropping patent allowances by about 90%...

Patently-O highlights work of Ron Katznelson

Posted on November 17, 2008
A Patently-O post begins:Ron Katznelson has become a leading patent data guru. In a recent talk at UC Davis Law School, he presented is ideas that the next focus of patent reform should be on USPTO Operations. His focus remains on (1) pendency and (2) quality without limiting patentee rights...

Classmates from Wm. R. Boone High?

Posted on November 17, 2008
LBE could not but chuckle at the description of Article One by AP :The idea is to tap the wisdom of the online masses to unearth "prior art" ? evidence that an invention is not novel and therefore doesn't deserve a patent ? that the Patent Office may not have known about when it approved the application...

Fee for registered patent attorneys [practitioner maintenance fee]

Posted on November 17, 2008
Patently-O writes:The USPTO has announced final rules to implement an annual practitioner maintenance fee. According to the new rules effective December 17, 2008, a practitioner who fails "to pay the annual practitioner maintenance fee required under § 11...

Intellectual Ventures and universities

Posted on November 16, 2008
Slashdot discusses deals of Intellectual Ventures with universities:"Intellectual Ventures (IV) will be setting up shop at the top of a Four Seasons this week as Headline Sponsor of the Ready to Commercialize 2008 conference hosted by the University of Texas at Austin...

Research Integrity Brownbag on J.H Schon

Posted on November 16, 2008
IPBiz ran across a set of PowerPoints on "research integrity." [pdf format]IPBiz notes that BEFORE the Beasley committee was formed, many physicists were questioning the results of Schon AND their questioning was falling on deaf ears, at Bell Labs and at the journals...

Aharonian will oppose a nomination of Winters as USPTO director

Posted on November 16, 2008
IP-watch reports:Should Winters be appointed, a lawsuit against her nomination will be filed by Gregory Aharonian, a patent analyst who was the lead plaintiff in last year?s legal suit against Peterlin, which claimed Peterlin did not have enough expertise in the field (IPW, US Policy, 13 September 2007)...

Jerusalem Post on Bilski

Posted on November 16, 2008
An article in the Jerusalem Post began:With a worldwide recession and credit crunch going on, Israeli hi-tech start-ups have their hands full just surviving. But now, after a decision by a US court in a relatively obscure case, many also fear they will have their hands full with a patent fight...

On slanting the past

Posted on November 16, 2008
In a piece in South Jersey's Courier Post titled Election brings redemption for Biden as a national candidate, NICOLE GAUDIANO (Gannett) wrote about:the embarrassing end to his 1988 presidential campaign when he forgot to attribute a portion of a speech and was accused of plagiarism...

CAFC on obviousness-type double-patenting

Posted on November 15, 2008
The case IN RE BASELL POLIOLEFINE ITALIA S.P.A. involves U.S. Patent 6,365,687, which has a rather ancient pedigree:The ?687 patent issued from U.S. application Ser. No. 07/883,912 (?the ?912 application?), which was filed on May 12, 1992 and is ?a continuation, of U...

Sometimes inventors do understand the significance of their invention!

Posted on November 15, 2008
In an upcoming article in the John Marshall Review of Intellectual Property , titled WHAT THE STORY OF THE INVENTION OF THE TRANSISTOR TEACHES US ABOUT 21ST CENTURY PATENT PRACTICE, LBE quotes Nick Holonyak, Jr.'s discussion of Mark Lemley's opinion that the inventors of the transistor foresaw uses only in the area of hearing aids...

On MRSA

Posted on November 15, 2008
from yahoo sports on an article discussing J.T. Snow, Jack Snow, and Kellen Winslow:This was a lesson the Rams learned the hard way: In the fall of 2003, five St. Louis players came down with methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), an increasingly common strain of staph which does not respond to the methicillin, thus requiring stronger antibiotics...

Better late than never?

Posted on November 14, 2008
On April 15, 2006, IPBiz had a post which included the text:But patent trolls are getting a bad rap. For one thing, most U.S. research universities fit Detkin?s definition cited above. Does anyone think Stanford University deserves less patent protection than, say, Microsoft, because it doesn?t make or sell products? On May 14, 2006, another blog [PHOSITA] noted:Well, kudos to Lawrence Ebert at the IPBiz blog who spent some time talking about patent trolls in a recent blog post...

Stealing confidential information in New Jersey

Posted on November 14, 2008
New Jersey thieves of confidential information have a bit of a safety net. The internetdefamationlawblog, describing State v. Reid, 194 N.J. 386 (2008), wrote:In Reid, the State prosecuted a case where a company alleged that a former employee was stealing its proprietary information using a confidential Internet password...

Oral argument in Tafas 5 Dec. 2008

Posted on November 14, 2008
Gene Quinn notes that oral argument in USPTO v. Tafas & GSK Appeal is set for Dec. 5, 2008 but argues that some one at the USPTO or DOJ ought to bag the appeal. Of note in the rousing post are two comments about Mark Lemley:#1. Gene,I agree with you completely on the merits, but doubt that anything will be done to stop this case...

Bleaching bacteria

Posted on November 14, 2008
yahoonews: Researchers at UMichigan had been studying a bacterial protein called heat shock protein 33, which is a kind of molecular chaperon that becomes active when cells are in distress, for example from the high temperature of a fever.When they exposed the bacteria to bleach, the heat shock protein became active in an attempt to protect other proteins in the bacteria from losing their chemical structure, forming clumps that would eventually die off...

Lobbying: it's about business interests, stupid

Posted on November 14, 2008
Beginning with text that Micosoft's outlay of almost $2 million for the third quarter 2008 alone nearly equaled the amount its rival Google Inc. spent in the first nine months of the year, AP wroteMicrosoft and Google battled over Google's plans to sell some of the online advertisements that appear alongside search results on Yahoo Inc...

Professor who punished plagiarists fired over FERPA

Posted on November 14, 2008
In a piece titled Vigilante Justice on Plagiarism, InsideHigherEd recounts the story of Loye Young of Texas A&M International University whose game plan of "outing" student plagiarists on the net got Young fired because of provisions of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, a federal law known widely as the Buckley Amendment or FERPA, which generally bars the release of educational records about students without their permission...

Patent law in China: all about business?

Posted on November 14, 2008
SanDisk, no stranger to patent litigation, is involved in patent litigation in China. Cui Xiaohuo (China Daily) reports that there was a hearing in Beijing's No 1 Intermediate People's Court on 13 Nov. 2008 in a dispute between Shenzhen firm Netac and SanDisk, who had acquired a patent for flash memory technology after the takeover of Israeli firm M-Systems, which had developed it...

Foamy construction?

Posted on November 13, 2008
Somewhat surprisingly, the truck below is delivering construction materials:

Seen in an elevator

Posted on November 13, 2008
Seen in an elevator at a Hampton Inn:

Stem cell research comatose as a political issue, or simply comatose?

Posted on November 11, 2008
californiastemcellreport carries text from Jesse Reynolds of the Center for Genetics and Society: "...(T)he real message from this election cycle is the end of embryonic stem cell research as a relevant political issue. It was huge in 2004, present but marginal in 2006, and seemed comatose with the 2007's failure of New Jersey's stem cell funding initiative...

Former partners DuPont, Koch fight over Nylon patents

Posted on November 11, 2008
DuPont Co. has filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Koch Industries Inc.'s Invista unit in SDNY.Dow Jones reports: Invista says it bought the technology to make a critical chemical in the creation of the resins in question as part of its $4.2 billion purchase of DuPont's fibers business in 2004...

Blawg ranking by blawgsearch

Posted on November 11, 2008
IPBiz managed to stay ahead of the dormant patent troll tracker blog:IP Thinktank [feed]Covers intellectual property strategy around the world. By Duncan Bucknell.Last Updated: November 10, 2008 - Rank Today: 7http://duncanbucknell.com/blogIPBiz [feed]Intellectual property news affecting business and everyday life...

Bilski ramblings

Posted on November 11, 2008
An article in BusinessWeek titled Patent Office Stifles Innovation assails the Bilski decision:Notably, during Apple's recent quarterly report, Jobs commented about the iPhone: "The traditional game in the phone market has been to produce a voice phone in 100 different varieties...

On gold-plating patents

Posted on November 11, 2008
See On gold-plating patents in Intellectual Property Today.See alsohttp://ipbiz.blogspot.com/2008/10/gold-plated-debate.htmlhttp://ipbiz.blogspot.com/2008/11/shame-of-gold-plated-patents.html

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