Patent Law

CAFC judges soon to fall like dominos?

Posted on August 26, 2009
Marcia 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, 2009
Claude 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, 2009
Once 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, 2009
An 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...

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"Accidental emailer" Alycia Lane lands job at KNBC

Posted on August 23, 2009
A 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, 2009
Aisha 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, 2009
In 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, 2009
In 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, 2009
The 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, 2009
As 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, 2009
A 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, 2009
IPBiz 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, 2009
A 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, 2009
A 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, 2009
A 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, 2009
Back 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, 2009
In 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, 2009
To 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, 2009
from 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, 2009
In 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, 2009
In 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, 2009
Lots 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, 2009
The 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, 2009
In 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, 2009
Aaron 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, 2009
Dr. 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, 2009
In 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, 2009
The 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, 2009
Tony 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, 2009
Joyce 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...

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