Patent Law

Google v. Microsoft: Android/Windows, Google/Bing

Posted on June 03, 2009
A Bloomberg story Google?s Android Software to Run Laptops, Taking on Microsoft outlines some of the upcoming battles to occur between Google and Microsoft.Note Android is based on Linux. [Google introduced Android in 2007 as a software system for mobile phones...

Titan v. Case: litigants may err in addressing proper presumptions?

Posted on June 03, 2009
Titan and Goodyear lost on a request for a preliminary injunction in a tractor tire design patent case.Interesting text from the CAFC-->In the appeal before us, the parties stated the issue as whether Case succeeded before the trial court in raising a substantial question of invalidity...

Greenfuel: IP for sale

Posted on June 03, 2009
Wade Roush at XConomy notes that Greenfuel, which ceased operation on May 13, is selling off assets, including IP:In a post on its website June 2, 2009, the company said it?s entertaining offers for its basic algae production technology?big tanks designed to be installed next to facilities such as cement plants that emit lots of carbon dioxide, which can be captured and converted into plant matter through photosynthesis...

Brill argues for stronger inequitable conduct penalties

Posted on June 02, 2009
Alex Brill in Forbes:Congress, engaged in an ambitious process to reform the patent system in the U.S., is contemplating changing the rules with regard to inequitable conduct. Shockingly, however, they are being asked to weaken, not strengthen, the deterrent against fraud...

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Sanofi's PARP inhibitor

Posted on June 02, 2009
Sanofi-Aventis bought BiPar to obtain rights to BiPar's BSI-201, which belongs to a new class of drugs that block a cell repair enzyme known as PARP. An issue is that BiPar's main composition patent in the US runs out in 2013, although it might be extended.

GM to file bankruptcy 1 Jun 09

Posted on June 01, 2009
From a Bloomberg report:?GM going through bankruptcy is a very positive thing for the auto industry: They should emerge as a reasonable competitor,? said Len Blum, managing director at investment- banking firm Westwood Capital LLC in New York. ?The only thing that?s been holding GM back is labor contracts and relationships with debtors and franchisees...

Death of Paul Haney, voice of Gemini and Apollo

Posted on June 01, 2009
Yahoo News reported the death of Paul Haney, who was known as the "voice of NASA's Mission Control" for his live televised reports during the early years of the space program.Project Mercury flights were accompanied by the voice of John A. "Shorty" Powers .

Supreme Court to hear Bilski

Posted on June 01, 2009
On June 1, the day General Motors filed for bankruptcy, the Supreme Court decided to hear Bilski.The LA Times wrote:While some software and business consulting giants backed Bilski's quest for a broad, inclusive definition of what is patentable, others, including Microsoft Corp...

ArticleOne and Merck's Singulair: the need to cite employee science articles in the IDS

Posted on May 31, 2009
A May 29 WSJ piece begins:The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has ordered a re-examination of a key patent for Merck & Co.'s blockbuster Singulair allergy and asthma drug, saying new questions have been raised about its "patentability."and includes the text:In April, a firm called Article One Partners LLC filed a request with the Patent Office to re-examine the patent, citing information that wasn't brought to the attention of the patent examiner who reviewed Merck's initial application in the 1990s, including a paper by a Merck scientist...

Pravda post on Obama: America as Weimar Republic?

Posted on May 30, 2009
A post on english.pravda.ru titled American capitalism gone with a whimper began withIt must be said, that like the breaking of a great dam, the American decent into Marxism is happening with breath taking speed, against the back drop of a passive, hapless sheeple, excuse me dear reader, I meant people...

Isolated points

Posted on May 29, 2009
There are currently over 100 mentions of wikipedia on IPBiz. On May 28, IPBiz got a harsh comment about one of them:The statement "wikipedia has altered entries" indicates a serious misunderstanding of Wikipedia. The transformation you observed in Wikipedia's Joe Biden entry may very well have reflected political bias, but it's the bias of the "editor" who made the change, not of Wikipedia...

Innovation and invention, again

Posted on May 29, 2009
IPWatchDog had a post on 9 March 09 titled Change in Patent Office Philosophy Can Lead Recovery which included the text:What we need is a novel approach to issuing patents. It has always seemed strange to me that we call the patent process a non-adversarial ex parte process...

The Great Canadian Cut-and-Paste Caper

Posted on May 29, 2009
Early in 2009, there was a ripple of irony when it was found that Southern Illinois University [SIU], home of a plagiarist President, had plagiarized text in its anti-plagiarism policy from Indiana University. Now, in May, we have the the great Canadian cut-and-paste caper, wherein the Conference Board of Canada, supposedly an independent research organization, copied without attribution text from the Intellectual Property Alliance, a US lobbying organization, to advocate positions in the area of copyright...

"We talk and it's gone"

Posted on May 28, 2009
Ken Robertson was talking about broadcasters ripping off the print media in writing:"Broadcasters are used to this 'we talk and it's gone' mentality, and they get into a habit of taking short cuts."IP profs sometimes take the "we write and it's gone" approach to scholarship...

Sotomayor on IP

Posted on May 27, 2009
One IPBiz reader complained that IPBiz had not commented on the IP decisions of Judge Sotomayor and sent along the following:Sotomayor SCOTUS case history: Intellectual propertyPosted: 06:53 PM ETFrom CNN Research Director Robert YoonWASHINGTON (CNN) ? During Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor's 17 years as a federal judge, the U...

Schatten quoted by Nature on GFP in marmosets

Posted on May 27, 2009
One year after the discoverers of the green fluorescent protein won the Nobel Prize in chemistry ( Japanese-born Osamu Shimomura of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, Martin Chalfie of Columbia University in New York and Roger Tsien of the University of California, San Diego), other workers (Erika Sasaki and Hideyuki Okano of the Keio University School of Medicine in Japan ) put GFP in marmosets...

Alexander the Great to Aristotle on publications vs. trade secrets

Posted on May 27, 2009
from livius.org:It would appear that Alexander the Great received from Aristotle not only his doctrines of Morals and of Politics, but also something of those more abstruse and profound theories which these philosophers, by the very names they gave them, professed to reserve for oral communication to the initiated, and did not allow many to become acquainted with...

GM bankruptcy looms

Posted on May 27, 2009
AP reports:-->A General Motors Corp. bankruptcy filing seemed inevitable after a rebellion by its bondholders forced it to withdraw on Wednesday a plan to swap bond debt for company stock.GM has until Monday, June 1 to complete a government-ordered restructuring that includes debt reduction, labor cost cuts and plant closures...

Rectangular Roomba?

Posted on May 26, 2009
Published US patent application 20080276407 has an abstractAn autonomous coverage robot includes a chassis having forward and rearward portions and a drive system carried by the chassis. The forward portion of the chassis defines a substantially rectangular shape...

The last racists in Europe, patent people?

Posted on May 26, 2009
The IAM blog had some intense comments about quotes attributed to SAS's Kalliopi Spyridaki which appeared in the article Is the demand for patents stifling reform? by Paul Meller in Science Business:?We file only in the US, for reasons including the cost of filing and litigation in Europe as well as the complexity of the system here...

Twitter and Drudge

Posted on May 26, 2009
A post at the Miami Herald Twitter poses risks for papers begins with Drudge:The end began in January 1998, when Matt Drudge broke the story on his blog that linked President Clinton amorously to a young White House intern. At least that's how his scoop is remembered, as a signature moment in the growing dominance of online news...

Patent fight in birth control area

Posted on May 25, 2009
AP has a story which includes the text:Conceptus ( CPTS ) claims Hologic ( HOLX )'s plan to sell the Adiana birth control system will infringe on the patent for Conceptus' Essure system. Conceptus is asking the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California for an injunction against Adiana sales in the U...

More output from independent inventors in the bad economy

Posted on May 25, 2009
Alana Semuels has a piece in the LATimes titled: Recession is giving inventors time to fine-tune their ideas. The first sentence has an allusion to Chester Carlson, the inventor of xerography: If we have the Great Depression to thank for inventions such as the Twinkie, Monopoly and the photocopier...

Artistic license

Posted on May 25, 2009
The JMRI webpage discusses the "model train" case in a post titled: JMRI Defense: Articles by Others. Although IPBiz was "on" this case back in June 2006, the only mention of this on JMRI is the text: Another article by a patent attorney discussed aspects of the case in June...

Kanzius obtains US 7,510,555

Posted on May 25, 2009
A search of the USPTO database on 25 May 09 revealed one patent issued to John Kanzius, US 7,510,555 issued on March 31, 2009. The first claim states:A method for killing or damaging target cells in a patient, comprising: introducing into the patient RF absorption enhancers capable of selectively binding to the target cells and further capable of generating sufficient heat to kill or damage the bound target cells by heat generated solely by the application of an RF field generated by an RF signal between a transmission head and a reception head that is different from the transmission head; arranging the transmission and reception heads on opposite sides of a portion of the patient for treatment; and irradiating the portion of the patient between the transmission and reception heads containing RF absorption enhancers with an RF field to kill or damage the target cells from the heat generated by the RF absorption enhancers...

Timex loses in Paragon case

Posted on May 25, 2009
An assertion of infringement by Timex of claims of Paragon's US 6,736,759 got back on track, as the CAFC vacated the judgment of noninfringement by Judge Michael R. Barrett and remanded for further proceedings consistent with this opinion. Of disavowal of claim scope:?[A] patentee may limit the meaning of a claim term by making a clear and unmistakable disavowal of scope during prosecution...

Epistar gets to challenge validity of Philips' US 5,008,718

Posted on May 25, 2009
Epistar v. ITC gets into issues with covenants not to challenge patent validity, andalso of issues of disavowal of claim scope.Of covenants not to challenge the validity of the patent:On August 30, 2001, Lumileds and UEC settled the litigation by negotiating and executing a Settlement Agreement and Mutual Release, Stipulated Consent Judgment, and License Agreement...

CAFC finds license inherently to include "have made" rights

Posted on May 25, 2009
Corebrace went after Star for having a third party make a productunder the license of Corebrace to Star. Corebrace lost on a 12(b)(6)at district court and at the CAFC. The key line by the CAFC: The right to ?make, use, and sell? a product inherently includes the right to have it made by a third party, absent a clear indication of intent to the contrary...

CAFC grants mandamus, transfer of venue in Sanofi case

Posted on May 25, 2009
In the case IN RE GENENTECH, INC. and BIOGEN IDEC INC., the petitioners sought, and obtained, a writ of mandamus to move the patent case from ED Texas to ND California. The opposing party, Sanofi-Aventis Deutschland GmbH, was represented by McDonnell Boehnen Hulbert & Berghoff LLP, of Chicago...

Siegel calls for NY Times to remove Dowd

Posted on May 25, 2009
ROBERT S. SIEGEL writes on the Dowd plagiarism business:Slate?s Jack Shafer noted that Dowd handled herself well during the incident by responding promptly and openly with an explanation that was not an excuse. He adds that her next step should be a column telling readers how this whole thing happened...

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