Patent Law

Is Patently-O thread on obviousness predictably obvious?

Posted on December 07, 2009
In a post on Patently-O titled David Kappos and The Impact of KSR ? a unique opportunity for our profession, one has a comment thread that is mostly about obviousness and little about David Kappos. It re-visits a lot of previous commentary.Predictably, MaxDrei speaks of the European PSA (problem and solution approach)...

48% of surveyed students admit to cheating

Posted on December 07, 2009
Within an article by Amy Dalrymple of INFORUM, note the text:Rutgers University professor Don McCabe has done surveys for the Center for Academic Integrity each year since 2002 on the issue.His results show that 48 percent of the 70,000 undergraduate students surveyed said they?ve done written cheating, which includes plagiarism, submitting work done by someone else or other forms of dishonesty...

Wikipedia problematic on Kanzius

Posted on December 07, 2009
From Wikipedia: The details of the process are still unreleased pending the issuance of a patent.from ref. 18: Ogden, Shannon (2007-07-05). "Salt Water Fuel". First Coast News. Retrieved 2007-07-26.IPBiz: duh? The details are available in a published patent application.

Chris Reed criticizes Sacramento Bee over Hier Tran story

Posted on December 06, 2009
In a post titled Bee defies own policy, won't fix error, Chris Reed criticizes Sacramento Bee columnist Dan Walters for not disclosing Reed's role in breaking the Hier Tran degree fraud story. Excerpts:I broke this story on Dec. 18, 2008, with a blog item headlined "Breaking news: Air board investigating whether lead scientist on diesel regs lied about his Ph...

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Bureau of Labor Statistics: "There are 6.3 job hunters for every available job"

Posted on December 06, 2009
Noting that the BLS has found 6.3 job hunters per job, an employment advice column includes the following text and then the 10 most common mistakes in a job interview:"The competition is tough enough without giving potential employers reasons not to hire you," says Tim Schoonover, chairman of outplacement and leadership-development firm OI Partners...

ClimateGate: Physicists request change in APS policy statement

Posted on December 05, 2009
A group of physicists are requesting, in view of the revelations in ClimateGate, that the APS alter its statement on global warming.Included in the changes is a DELETION of the text:The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring.and an inclusion of the text:Current climate models appear insufficiently reliable to properly account for natural and anthropogenic contributions to past climate change, much less project future climate...

Kodak to sell LG its OLED technology

Posted on December 05, 2009
The sale of Kodak's Organic Light Emitting Diodes businesses to South Korea's LG, announced 4 Dec 09, comes after Kodak earlier this year said it would lower spending by trimming investment in some cutting-edge technologies.see also Kodak, Sony settle digital camera litigation

Plagiarists unwelcome at The Huffington Post

Posted on December 05, 2009
Concerning the plagiarism affair involving Mona Sarika, a post on HuffingtonPost includes the following text:Mario Ruiz, Vice President of Huffington Post Media relations, responded to questions via email."Once we establish that a story or blog post has been plagiarized, we remove the story from our site and revoke the plagiarist's right to ever post on The Huffington Post again...

California soot researcher lied about his Ph.D.

Posted on December 03, 2009
AP has reported:A member of the California Air Resources Board wants to suspend new diesel emissions rules for trucks and buses after learning that a researcher whose work contributed to the rules falsified his credentials.The researcher, Hien Tran, compiled research on health effects of soot...

Howrey found to violate RPC 1.7

Posted on December 01, 2009
Henry Gottlieb reports in the New Jersey Law Journal on the issue of Howrey violating RPC 1.7 in two cases in the stent wars, wherein Boston Scientific is a plaintiff in the District of Delaware and a defendant in the District of New Jersey.In D NJ, the ruling was that Howrey's Washington office can't continue defending Boston Scientific Corp...

Scientists as three card monte dealers?

Posted on December 01, 2009
Within AmericanThinker:The concept of unblemished scientific integrity is now one with the scholastic monasteries and the academy at Athens. Scientists today are well on their way to becoming an amalgam of the cheap politician and the three-card monte dealer...

The transformation of AOL

Posted on December 01, 2009
The Wall Street Journal reports:In December, 2009, when it becomes a stand-alone company, AOL will begin to tap a new digital-newsroom system that uses a series of algorithms to predict the types of stories, videos and photos that will be most popular with consumers and marketers...

KSR v. Teleflex: story-telling is nice, but...

Posted on November 30, 2009
Back in June 2007, IPBiz noted the response of one practitioner to KSR v. Teleflex was that KSR required the patent advocate to tell an extremely cool story to the USPTO (or to the court). Flash forward to the BIO Corporate Counsel meeting in DC in 2009, and someone was making exactly the same point...

Fighting "term paper mills," and bigger problems

Posted on November 30, 2009
An article in the Badger-Herald notes that a Professor Chad Weidner has a lawsuit against the "paper mill" R2C2 and its owner Rusty Carroll. Although one can readily see why an academic might have problems with a company that sells term papers and the like, one notes that there are similar areas wherein academics don't take such strong stands...

Kappos: "But the truth is the USPTO is struggling."

Posted on November 29, 2009
An article in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel ends with a quote of David Kappos, USPTO Director: "But the truth is the USPTO is struggling."The article is mainly about a company co-owned by Dick Capstram: As a self-educated inventor whose father ran a garage in Chicago, Capstran won his first patent in 1969 for an automotive exhaust system...

Article in Guardian by Sulston criticized

Posted on November 29, 2009
Further to an earlier IPBiz report, the blog IPKat reports criticism of a report by John Sulston, Sarah Chan and Professor John Harris published in the Guardian. [see Manchester misleads on patents ] The Chartered Institute of Patent Attorneys [CIPA] noted: ?Contrary to what is stated in the report, ...

The perils of collaborative peer review

Posted on November 29, 2009
Christopher Booker writes:Back in 2006, when the eminent US statistician Professor Edward Wegman produced an expert report for the US Congress vindicating Steve McIntyre's demolition of the "hockey stick", he excoriated the way in which this same "tightly knit group" of academics seemed only too keen to collaborate with each other and to "peer review" each other's papers in order to dominate the findings of those IPCC reports on which much of the future of the US and world economy may hang...

Wikipedia as a valuable source of plagiarism?

Posted on November 29, 2009
In response to reports that Wikipedia is failing, Craig Buckler writes at sitepoint:It?s utter nonsense. Wikipedia remains one of the most popular sites on the web and is valuable source of plagiarism for every homework-hating student! Over 14 million articles have been published, it?s normally at the top of Google searches, and receives 325 million visits every month...

Invention of the push-pin

Posted on November 29, 2009
CBS Sunday Morning on 29 Nov 09 had a short piece on art with colored pushpins. The piece did not mention Georges Seurat or pointillism. The piece did mention the invention around 1900 of the pushpin by Edwin Moore, a student at Princeton University, using phonograph needles and glass...

Alfred E. Beach and New Jersey's other Bill Bradley

Posted on November 29, 2009
There is a section of Bridgewater, New Jersey named "Bradley Gardens," which name derives from William Bradley (1852-1924).Of relevance to recent discussion in Bilski oral argument about horse training methods, Bradley got his start by using horses to move things...

Bilski and the origin of method claims

Posted on November 29, 2009
Eben Moglen writes on the Huffington Post:Only in 1953, after the industrial transformation of the American economy was long since complete, did Congress amend the Patent Act to permit "process" as well as "product" patents. Within decades of the change, patent law was being used for purposes that Congress had plainly not envisioned in 1953...

CJ Michel: "If they get it a little wrong, it will do a lot of harm"

Posted on November 28, 2009
Chief Judge Michel of the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit on the impact of error by Congress in patent reform: "If they get it a little wrong, it will do a lot of harm."Of testimony gathered by Congress on patent reform: "No judge was ever called as a witness, which seems to me a bit odd It's mostly corporate people from a limited number of companies...

ClimateGate: is a flawed academic consensus really the best?

Posted on November 28, 2009
In the recent discussions of "ClimateGate" involving emails from/to professors at CRU at East Anglia University, there was a small side discussion (invoking names such as Nate Silver and Robin Hanson) on whether or not prediction markets (which incentivize accuracy) could handle the issue of global warming...

Obama names Gutmann to chair bioethics panel

Posted on November 27, 2009
Genetic Engineering and Bioengineering News reports:President Barack Obama has created a new Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues and appointed Amy Gutmann, president of the University of Pennsylvania, to serve as chair and James W...

Cars and patents and Jacob Krippelz

Posted on November 27, 2009
Of the silliness of Gray/Wegner on counting numbers of patents, the PatentHawk blog has text:Wegner and Gray get silly over automotive patents. "Does patenting a better muffler help the auto industry? In the automotive industry - where cars are sold based upon every factor other than patents - more patents are obtained by the majors than in biotech and pharma...

Apple sues Media Solutions over power adaptor

Posted on November 26, 2009
InformationWeek noted that Apple filed suit against Media Solutions Holdings, a company based in Anaheim, on 23 Nov. 09 concerning sales by Media of power adaptors for Apple computers.InformationWeek noted: "Of the 15 or so patent lawsuits filed during the second half of 2009 that involve Apple, the company is the plaintiff only in this one case...

Simply counting numbers of patents is missing the big picture

Posted on November 26, 2009
The IAM Blog posted on a recent study by Gray/Wegner of Foley & Lardner, which study observed, among other things:#1. Within the coming decade it may be estimated that just 150 companies will  account for 50 % of all American  patents granted, while just the top ten  companies will soon account for 20 %  of all patents granted #2...

Masnick, again

Posted on November 26, 2009
IPBiz just noticed an interesting comment by Mike Masnick, the guy who gets more mileage out of nothing than Jerry Seinfeld.In context, one commenter to TechDirt wrote:Jaffe, Lemley and Lerner are shills for Microsoft, et al...As below, Mr. Lemley is paid by those pushing patent "deform" and therefore biased ...

Manhattanhenge featured on CSI-New York

Posted on November 26, 2009
The Nov. 25 episode of CSI-New York, concluding the compass killer saga, included discussion (and photo) of ManhattanHenge.According to wikipedia, the term "Manhattanhenge" was coined by PBS star Neil deGrasse Tyson.Of wikipedia, note the statement cyanobacteria "differ from other gram-negative bacteria in that the quorum sensing molecules autoinducer-2 and acyl-homoserine lactones are absent...

Patents big time on NCIS-Los Angeles

Posted on November 24, 2009
The victim on the Nov. 24 episode of NCIS - Los Angeles was making money big time from "submarine patents." No not that kind: patents related to real submarines.The murderer worked at a law firm.The episode disclosed that Abby Sciuto has a blog.***SeparatelyPhilly channel 3 news on Nov...

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