Patent Law

Michel on Jaffe/Lerner

Posted on May 24, 2009
The 271Blog has excerpts from a past speech by Judge Michel which include:And Professors Jaffee and Lerner, who are very highly qualified economists, wrote in their book, which many of you read, that the courts often give double damages and actually cited a case that I was involved in as an example of double damages, and they said that I gave both lost profit damage and reasonable royalty damages to the winning patentee...

Airplane toilet queue patent: it's back!

Posted on May 24, 2009
In a 20 May 09 post titled Flushing away Bilski, Aaron R. Feigelson discusses U.S. Patent No. 7.535.367, Airplane lavatory reservation system, which evokes memories of IBM's6,329,919. Feigelson links to an EE Times article about a talk given by Jon Dudas in San Jose [Speaking at an IP symposium here on Wednesday (April 16, 2008) ] and suggests Dudas may have been referring to the '367 when Dudas talked about an application the USPTO ?recently received for what was claimed to be a better way to stand in line while waiting to use an airplane toilet? as an illustration of declining application quality...

Patent officials run amok?

Posted on May 24, 2009
One finds the text --patent officials run amok-- within an editorial at the San Francisco Chronicle on the Myriad case.The editorial views gravity as an abstract idea, as distinct from a law of nature:Traditionally, the Supreme Court has held that no one is allowed to patent products of nature (like apples or gold), laws of nature (like E=MC squared) or abstract ideas (like gravity)...

Blogspot blogger accused of plagiarism

Posted on May 23, 2009
The Toledo Blade reports that Former Lucas County (Ohio) Commissioner Maggie Thurber, who writes on thurbersthoughts.blogspot.com, resigned as columnist for the Toledo Free Press after being accused of plagiarism in a column about Memorial Day. The issue was one of plagiarism from the internet...

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Grant plagiarist Chu sues Texas Southern University

Posted on May 23, 2009
IPBiz had earlier discussed the plagiarism of a research grant application by physics prof Rambis Chu. Now, Chu has taken a leaf out of the San Filippo notebook and sued the university over due process issues. The Houston Chronicle reported:Chu, who was granted tenure as an associate professor of physics last spring, is accused of submitting a grant proposal to the U...

USPTO examiners told to allow more cases?

Posted on May 23, 2009
A post on 22 May at IPWatchDog titled Patent Examiners Told To Issue Patents includes the text: The patent examiner told Mark that about 2 weeks ago management told the examining corps that they need to start issuing patents. This may seem strange to those who are not familiar with how the Patent Office has been operating, but this is sadly important news to report...

Tessera wins at ITC

Posted on May 23, 2009
Forbes, through AP, reported: Shares of Tessera Technologies Inc. soared Thursday, 21 May 09, a day after a patent dispute ruling that could give a substantial boost to the company's earnings.One of the losers at the ITC was Qualcomm, who had been lionized by Jaffe and Lerner in Innovation and Its Discontents...

On "nonpartisan" organizations

Posted on May 23, 2009
The californiastemcellreport noted of the proposed NIH guidelines on stem cells:Citing the ?perverse effect? of proposed NIH stem cell research rules, the Consumer Watchdog group today [20 May 09] called for changes in the guidelines along the lines recommended by the California stem cell agency and the Interstate Alliance on Stem Cell Research...

Dowd's use of ghostwriters?

Posted on May 22, 2009
Maureen Dowd used material from a blog without attribution to ANYONE, and later said she got it from a friend.The CSMonitor via Politico on the Dowd plagiarism business:But that raised other issues about whether it?s common practice for Dowd to use entire passages from friends in her column without attribution...

CEO of Heifer International Foundation resigns over plagiarism investigation

Posted on May 22, 2009
Details are sketchy but the plagiarism investigation may involve the book Circle of Giving: Donors' Stories of Wisdom, which was published in 2006 by Eudora Press LLC of Little Rock. The Arkansas News wrote:Heifer Foundation replaced its president and chief executive 21 May 09 amid an investigation into allegations of copyright infringement and plagiarism...

Microsoft loses $200M jury verdict in ED Texas

Posted on May 22, 2009
On 20 May 09, a jury in ED Texas found that Microsoft had infringed claims of I4i's U.S. Patent No. 5,787,499. ComputerWorld noted:The technology that the court said infringes on the i4i patent enables custom XML tagging in Word 2003 and Word 2007, used mainly for people creating and modifying templates for Word documents...

Who gets fired first, older or younger people?

Posted on May 21, 2009
In a piece titled With Jobs Scarce, Age Becomes an Issue , Dana Mattioli suggests that younger workers, not older workers, may bear the brunt of reductions-in-force during the current economic downturn. Various lawyers are quoted:Age-discrimination lawsuits brought by older workers can cost more than the salary of the worker who was laid off and can hurt the company's reputation, according to Andria Ryan, partner at Atlanta law firm Fisher & Phillips LLP...

IP law profs and footnotes: gambling in Casablanca?

Posted on May 14, 2009
IPBiz hasn't seen much fallout from Steve Perlman calling a certain IP professor "a fucking liar". The 271blog wrote:At one point, it even sounds like he calls one of the authors that contributed to matters cited in the Congressional Report a "f***ing liar" (this is not crystal clear, but you can judge for yourself at about the 7:35 point of the video) [See Video: Intel, Startups Debate Patent Reform Efforts]The words sound crystal clear in the clip and the targeted offender is identified...

McKiernan McClellan'd

Posted on May 14, 2009
One IPBiz reader exactly got my point on McKiernan's demise. Palin did not mis-speak in the Vice-Presidential debate. She was using Civil War-speak to predict, accurately, McKiernan's termination and rationale therefore. The oafish reporters completely missed the subtle, intentional malapropism.

Meet the new obviousness, same as the old obviousness?

Posted on May 14, 2009
Teva, represented by Kenyon & Kenyon, lost its appeal from a decision of Judge Farnan (D. Del.) in Procter & Gamble v. Teva over patents relating to the compound risedronate, the active ingredient of P&G?s osteoporosis drug Actonel®.The case involved allegations of obviousness...

ACLU sues the US patent office

Posted on May 14, 2009
In a suit in SD NY, captioned Association for Molecular Pathology, et al. v. U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, et al., attorneys from the ACLU and PubPat go after patents to Myriad which involve BRCA.A story at biocompare notes:The patents granted to Myriad give the company the exclusive right to perform diagnostic tests on the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes and to prevent any researcher from even looking at the genes without first getting permission from Myriad...

Wikipedia, journalists tricked on Jarre entry

Posted on May 12, 2009
From tech.yahoo:Shane Fitzgerald said one of his University College Dublin classes was exploring how quickly information was transmitted around the globe. His private concern was that, under pressure to produce news instantly, media outlets were increasingly relying on Internet sources ? none more ubiquitous than the publicly edited Wikipedia...

McKiernan gone; remember his impact in the VP debate?

Posted on May 12, 2009
News yahoo reports:Gates announced that he had asked for and requested the resignation of his top commander in Afghanistan, Army General David McKiernan, after only 11 months in that theater. The 37-year veteran will be replaced by Army Lieutenant General Stanley McChrystal...

DNA analysis shows truth to "switched at birth"

Posted on May 12, 2009
When LBE wrote on DNA profiling for the University of Chicago Roundtable, he wondered when DNA would be used to prove a "switched at birth" story. In 2009, there is one.There had been rumors that Kay Rene Reed Qualls (now of Heppner, Oregon) and DeeAnn Angell Shafer (now of Richland, Wash...

Lemley predicting a return of fee diversion from the USPTO?

Posted on May 11, 2009
Suzanne Kubota of FederalNewsRadio.com wrote:While a drop in applications will reduce the workload, Lemley says what little funding that does come into the Office is at risk.Congress has had a tendency to take away some of that fee revenue and use it towards the general federal revenue and I think that's probably going to be an attractive alternative for Congress because of the substantial budget deficit...

More publication fraud in stem cell area?

Posted on May 11, 2009
Xinhua reports of charges made by Lu Daopei against Huang Xiaojun:Lu, who teaches at Peking University and Fudan University in Shanghai, displayed a certificate at a press conference in Beijing Thursday [7 May 09] showing that in 2006, he was recognized as the leader of a group that developed a new medical treatment protocol for preventing rejection of stem cell transplants in diseases such as leukemia...

IBM patent application on scheduling business meetings

Posted on May 11, 2009
In the flap that followed IBM's patent application on outsourcing methods (20090083107), IBM spokesman Steve Malkiewicz said Monday, 30 March 09 the application would be withdrawn because it "is contrary to our patent policy on business methods." On May 7, 2009 , one got a look at US published application 20090119148, titled SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR ENHANCING PRODUCTIVITY, which includes claims:Claim 1: A method including:defining, by a user, a time template including a plurality of predefined time intervals for scheduling meetings; andapplying the time template across a collaborative system...

Patent deal in renewable wave energy

Posted on May 11, 2009
Reuters notes: Wind-farm developer Renewable Energy Holdings Plc said on 11 May 09 it had agreed to sell its wave energy patent portfolio, known as CETO, to Australia's Carnegie Corp Ltd for about 30 million pounds ($45 million).

Video of Simon / Perlman debate on patent reform

Posted on May 10, 2009
The video of the Simon - Perlman discussion of patent reform (on 6 May 09, at the Commonwealth Club of California) is worth a look, especially to see Perlman's comments on Professors Mark Lemley and John Thomas.Perlman mentions he contacted Mallun Yen of Cisco about papers supporting apportionment of damages...

The "modest proposal" for inventor ownership: too late in the day?

Posted on May 10, 2009
Ron Watson at EDN in a piece titled, A modest proposal to save the Intellectual Property system from patent securitization, suggests:No one seems any longer interested in the original idea: that the patent system should protect the inventor?not his or her employer?and by protecting the inventor encourage publication of the work, thereby accelerating the pace of innovation...

Akin Gump loses jury verdict in patent prosecution malpractice case

Posted on May 10, 2009
The ABAJournal notes: Jurors in a San Antonio federal trial have awarded plaintiffs $72.6 million in a malpractice case against Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld.The underlying issue was failure to disclose a reference to the USPTO: the plaintiffs had alleged the law firm failed to disclose material information to the U...

Plagiarism, not about intent, but sloppiness?

Posted on May 10, 2009
The Tuscaloosa News quoting Carl Boening, now chair of the behavioral studies division at Shelton State Community College on the Meehan matter :?There?s some interesting similarities in the language that was used, but plagiarism a lot of times is not about intent, but sloppiness...

Plagiarism and the scientific method?

Posted on May 09, 2009
Within the Tuscaloosa News on Meehan's thesis:So far, so good. I can't see anything wrong with extending one line of research in new directions. In fact, that's what the scientific method is all about. We do similar things with news stories. If one newspaper looks at an issue in their hometown, we may look at the same issue here...

Forbes on biofuels

Posted on May 07, 2009
Forbes notes 1,865 companies in biofuels. They talk about some in an article titled: Biofuels Battle: Chemistry Versus Biology.Of algae:These specialized algae, though, require special care. They must be kept in contained, and expensive, "bioreactors" for example, so they won't be out-competed by wild algae...

Supreme Court reverses CAFC in Carlsbad

Posted on May 07, 2009
For a blast to the past, review comments on Patently-O in Feb 09.

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