Patent Law

ABBA nixes reunion tour: message for Microsoft?

Posted on July 07, 2008
In explaining the decision NOT to do an ABBA reunion tour, Bjorn Ulvaeus said"money is not a factor and we would like people to remember us as we were. Young, exuberant, full of energy and ambition."Perhaps Microsoft, and some of the other IT folks, ought to think about that...

When innovative ideas become routine

Posted on July 06, 2008
A note to Congress: don't look to the past for ideas about innovation or patent reform.Of Starbucks, Reuters noted:The company that began as innovative is now known for consistency and convenience, she said. "To me, that's a huge step down," she said...

Patent confusion at eWeek?

Posted on July 06, 2008
In Tech Titans Form Patent Trust about Allied Security Trust, Roy Mark of eWeek portrays a misleading idea that the trust was formed in response to the failure of patent reform (S.1145) in the Senate -->With efforts at patent reform stymied in the U.S...

Re-exams in golf ball wars

Posted on July 06, 2008
Although Callaway won at trial, Acushnet is winning in re-examination.See alsohttp://ipbiz.blogspot.com/2006/02/more-golf-ball-wars-callaway-sues.htmlPro V1

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Authorized generics and health systems with limited funds

Posted on July 06, 2008
Speaking of the recent acquisition of Ranbaxy, the Economic Times noted:For Indian companies, the challenges in product patent regime, in the generics business are significant: margin pressure, legal issues, parallel launch of authorised generics, accessing the distribution channels and so on...

John LeGuyader on restriction practice

Posted on July 05, 2008
Patent Baristas has an interview with John LeGuyader, Director of TC 1600 at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Within one finds the text:[QUESTION] In a situation where the Examiner finds an elected species to be allowable but deems the claims not enabled or lacking an adequate written description over their entire scope, another provision of the proposed rule would permit the Examiner to require restriction of the claims to the elected species...

Harvard plagiarism 2008: live and let live

Posted on July 05, 2008
Back in 2005, the Harvard Crimson was talking about the punishment given to plagiarist Laurence Tribe, and earlier about the disparity in treatment accorded student plagiarists vs. professor plagiarists.Flash forward to 3 July 2008 to a post Plagiarism at Harvard on basicjournalism:The price for plagiarism can be colossal, for students and professors alike...

Invalidity under 112 P 2 in Fargo v. Iris

Posted on July 05, 2008
The CAFC affirmed a finding of indefiniteness. The CAFC noted:A plain reading of claim 8 shows that there is an error. We reject Fargo?s argument to the contrary. As the district court noted, ?the phrase ?second supports other than the? naturally leads the reader to expect a description of a further subset of that category of supports known as ?second supports...

Yes, Virginia, patent royalties are taxable

Posted on July 05, 2008
In an article archived on the Sutherland law firm web site, one finds:"AIDS Researchers to Share Award for Biotech Work"Two Emory University AIDS researchers will share this year's Biomedical Industry Growth Award, the local biotech community's most prestigious honor...

Mossberg on going from PC to Apple

Posted on July 05, 2008
Mossberg notes:While the Windows and Mac user interfaces are broadly similar, they do have subtle variations in day-to-day use that require some re-education for switchers. And because there are so many fewer Mac users than Windows users, help from friends and co-workers can be harder to obtain than it is for people switching the other way, to Windows from Mac...

Google's patent application on "influencers"

Posted on July 05, 2008
Claim 1 of published application 20080162260 states:A computer-implemented method for displaying advertisements to members of a network, the method comprising:identifying one or more communities within a network, wherein the community comprises a plurality of members of the network;identifying one or more influencers in the one or more communities; andplacing one or more advertisements at the profiles of one or more members in the one or more communities...

Looking for Gary Rosenthal, once of Levittown, PA

Posted on July 04, 2008
IPBiz is looking for Gary Rosenthal, who lived in Mill Creek Apartments in Levittown, PA in the 1990's.

TRIPS/Doha

Posted on July 02, 2008
Patent Docs, discussing a letter from four Congressman to U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab, gets in TRIPS/Doha:The letter, to be kind, is naïve with regard to the state of intellectual property protection remaining in the TRIPS agreement after the Doha declaration...

Patent mis-translation case

Posted on July 02, 2008
The PatentHawk blog covers Gillet Outillage v. Fisher Tool which involved the mis-translation within US 6,189,190:The purported mistranslation is this: The patent claims a device for fastening together the pliers' handles using what would, in English, be termed a latch...

D NJ ruling in favor of AstraZeneca in Seroquel case

Posted on July 02, 2008
U.S. District Judge Joel Pisano in Trenton, New Jersey ruled in favor of AstraZeneca in the Seroquel matter on July 1, and AstraZeneca can ask Judge Pisano to block Teva and Sandoz from getting U.S. regulatory approval to sell copies of Seroquel until the patent expires in 2011...

Wikipedia, Bluefile, and hangon tags

Posted on July 02, 2008
from wikipedia: A tag has been placed on Bluefile, by another Wikipedia user, requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. The tag claims that it should be speedily deleted because Bluefile is very short providing little or no context to the reader...

Cutting and pasting

Posted on July 01, 2008
TechDirt re-posted a story on a bad "cut and paste" job by a law firm:Joe Mullin has a short post about a big time patent law firm that has launched two recent patent lawsuits over the same basic patents held by a patent holding firm. The only problem? In filing the second lawsuit, it appears that the patent attorneys used cut & paste from the first lawsuit, but didn't use search & replace to get rid of the name of the original defendant...

Learning about the invention process from Kleen-tex v. Mountville

Posted on July 01, 2008
The ND Ga case of Kleen-Tex v. Mountville teaches one many things about the impact of patent law in business. Although the legal issue was one of obviousness, there is a whole lot more to be learned about patent law, and the process of invention, from the written decision...

Students testing limits of turnitin

Posted on July 01, 2008
The Inquirer notes issues when students use turnitin more than once:Universities, catching on to the sheer amounts of plagiarism going on in Academia, had been asking students to submit their papers and dissertations through programs like ?Turnitin? which checks the ?work? for any tell-tale signs of copy pasting or wikipedia-ing...

NBC Nightly News on Countrywide meltdown

Posted on July 01, 2008
IPBiz has noted some "old" stories that have been reported on "NBC Nightly News" as "new." A June 30 story by Lisa Myers illustrated a different facet of NBC news reporting.On June 9, Correspondent Lisa Myers criticized lender Countrywide for being slow to help homeowners in trouble...

Lab notebooks in patent litigation

Posted on July 01, 2008
Patent Docs, in a post about University of Pittsburgh v. Hedrick, discusses how UCLA professors were removed as inventors of US Patent 6,777,231. Patent Docs noted: the District Court concluded that the University of Pittsburgh had carried its burden of showing by clear and convincing evidence that the UCLA inventors (Benhaim, Hedrick, Lorenz, and Zhu) were not inventors of the invention claimed in the '231 patent...

Pitfalls in bioinformatics patenting?

Posted on June 30, 2008
From crim law library blog, discussing SCITECH e-Merging News:Claiming Pitfalls in Bioinformatics Patent ApplicationsAnalysis by category patent data from the USPTO shows that the number of patents issued for bioinformatics-related subclasses is relatively low...

CIRM prejudiced against funding SCNT work?

Posted on June 30, 2008
In a post titled Cascade LifeSciences Critiques CIRM Grant Review Process; Questions Raised about Fairness and Facts, californiastemcellreport presents evidence that CIRM may be prejudiced AGAINST funding SCNT work. Comments from Cascade:"Cascades Experience with the Grant Review"Grant review comments were factually incorrect...

"Coalition for Patent Fairness" morphs into Allied Security Trust?

Posted on June 30, 2008
The WSJ noted:Several tech-industry heavyweights are banding together to defend themselves against patent-infringement lawsuits. Their plan: to buy up key intellectual property before it falls into the hands of parties that could use it against them, say people familiar with the matter...

Patently-O features Bessen and Meurer, again

Posted on June 30, 2008
Once more, you can almost hear him say: "now, there you go again."

"THE CONTROVERSY SURROUNDING CONTINUING APPLICATIONS"

Posted on June 30, 2008
In the article titled "THE CONTROVERSY SURROUNDING CONTINUING APPLICATIONS AND REQUESTS FOR CONTINUED EXAMINATION," [7 J. Marshall Rev. Intell. Prop. L. 545], Scott D. Barnett concludes:It is evident that there is a real need to increase patent prosecution efficiency, improve the quality of patents that issue, and decrease the current backlog...

Wegner on Bessen/Meurer in LA Times

Posted on June 30, 2008
Harold Wegner's piece on Bessen/Meurer that appeared in the Financial Times was reproduced in the Los Angeles Times. Text included:In this new book, "Patent Failure: How Judges, Bureaucrats, and Lawyers Put Innovation at Risk," economist James Bessen and law academic Michael Meurer show that the system no longer provides predictable property rights...

Pearlstein on patent reform

Posted on June 29, 2008
Steven Pearlstein wrote of "patent reform 2008":Consider the fate of a patent reform bill that has been on the agenda after years of complaints from inventors and high-tech companies about frivolous patents, endless litigation, excessive court judgments and conflicting signals from the federal courts...

Duh, really?

Posted on June 29, 2008
Californiastemcellreport has a post with the text:Several directors [of CIRM] have noted in the past that it is companies that most directly bring therapies to the marketplace ? not academic institutions.CIRM still flounders with a poorly-defined intellectual property policy, and recently engaged an attorney, not registered before the USPTO, to advise on IP matters...

Effectively claiming an invention

Posted on June 29, 2008
Patently-O has a post by Ron Slusky on claiming: Ron Slusky: Five Prescriptions for Effective Analyzing an Invention and then Claiming It. The first of the five: Identify the inventive concept by beginning from the problem that the inventor set out to solve and then asking how, broadly and functionally, the inventor solved that problem

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