Patent Law

"Law & Order" plotline follows Larry Mendte story

Posted on March 25, 2009
The episode of "Law and Order" of 25 March 09 combined elements of Bernie Madoff with the Larry Mendte Philly Channel 3 email snooping.As an odd coincidence in timing, the Law & Order episode immediately preceded a Channel 10 story on Larry Mendte's house arrest.

Negligence case filed against law firms in E-Pass/Palm case

Posted on March 24, 2009
Law.com noted:"In advising E-Pass to file and maintain their patent infringement claim, they spent $10 million in legal fees and costs without a sound basis to make the elemental case of patent infringement," said James Rosen of Rosen Saba, which filed the suit for E-Pass against its former lawyers at Moses & Singer and Squire Sanders.

900 year old book as prior art?

Posted on March 24, 2009
Buried as a comment on a just-n-examiner post on books as prior art is the text:I use Google books search along with EAST/WEST, Google Scholar, and PubMed searches. Of course my art makes these databases readily useable. In fact just a couple of weeks ago I found some great prior art in a book that I would not have ever come across in any of my other searches...

TomTom joins OIN on March 23, 2009

Posted on March 23, 2009
ComputerWorld noted:TomTom joined OIN on March 23. The OIN is an intellectual property company that was formed to promote Linux by using patents to create a collaborative ecosystem. Its members include IBM, Novell, Sony, and Red Hat.See also:http://ipbiz...

To access this complete feed in the blog feed reader login or register for free.

Confusion the origin of most plagiarism?

Posted on March 22, 2009
Taking a leaf out of the Glenn Poshard / SIU notebook, Purdue chemistry professor George M. Bodner gives us:Confusion about what constitutes plagiarism ? not malicious intent ? is the leading cause of plagiarism at the graduate school level, according to an expert presenting here today [22 March 09] on the increasingly worrisome problem at the 237th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS)...

On predicting outcomes of CAFC decisions

Posted on March 22, 2009
In December 2008, IPWatchDog wrote: It is hard to imagine that GlaxoSmithKline and Dr. Tafas could have drawn a better three judge panel then they did for this appeal of Judge Cacheris? ruling. The judges assigned to the panel hearing the case were Judges Rader, Bryson and Prost, who took turns laying it on the government attorney, USPTO General Counsel Toupin...

Survey on top law reviews

Posted on March 22, 2009
Brian Leiter of the University of Chicago did a survey:So I've closed the survey, and, with 265 votes, the results for "the top 20" are below. I think it tells us not a lot about "quality," though a fair bit about "perceptions," which certainly isn't irrelevant for younger scholars...

Rickover and Bayh-Dole

Posted on March 20, 2009
John Simpson wrote on californiastemcellreport:Of course taxpayers should benefit directly from the fruits of the research they have funded.This is not some harebrained, wacko leftist idea.Back when the Bayh-Doyle Act governing federal funding of research was being debated, Adm...

Tafas decided. Rule 78 is out, but ...

Posted on March 20, 2009
The CAFC determined that the USPTO does get Chevron deference on procedural rules. Of course, what is a procedural rule?With the analytical framework established, we turn to whether the Final Rules are substantive or procedural. The parties agree that the USPTO has authority under § 2(b)(2) to promulgate procedural rules...

Larson v. Aluminart on inequitable conduct; has the time come for en banc review?

Posted on March 20, 2009
This is a detailed case. Of some interest is the issue of failing to disclose to the USPTO Office Actions of the USPTO:We now come to Larson?s failure to disclose to the Reexamination Panel the Third and Fourth Office Actions from the ?039 Continuation...

TomTom goes after Microsoft with its own infringement action!

Posted on March 19, 2009
Further to Microsoft's patent suit against TomTom, and Tim Lee's comment on the tough situation of TomTom, TomTom has sued Microsoft.From the now-infringement defendant, through Horacio Gutierrez, corporate vice president and deputy general counsel of Intellectual Property and Licensing, Microsoft Corporation :"We are reviewing TomTom's filing, which we have just received...

Data do not support an explosive growth of patent litigation

Posted on March 19, 2009
Peter Zura at the 271Blog comments on recent data on IP litigation from the Judicial Business of the U.S. Courts:Claims of a patent litigation "explosion" continue to be unsupported by the latest data. Going back to 2004, the number of patent cases filed per year break down this way:2004 - 3,075 patent cases2005 - 2,720 patent cases2006 - 2,830 patent cases2007 - 2,896 patent cases2008 - 2,909 patent casesConsidering that 9,573 IP lawsuits were filed in 2008, patent litigation made up only 30% of all IP litigation...

Smith&Nephew whacks KCI vacuum bandage in Germany

Posted on March 18, 2009
EarthTimes reports: Smith & Nephew Inc.'s Advanced Wound Management division announced that the German Federal Patent Court in Munich has held the Wake Forest patent for negative pressure (NPWT) licensed to Kinetic Concepts, Inc. invalid in Germany...

Catch-22 for TomTom?

Posted on March 18, 2009
Tim Lee writes in a post about Micosoft/TomTom:A bit of background is helpful here. When the Free Software Foundation drafted version 2 of the GPL, it included a clause saying that if a vendor is forced to place restrictions on downstream redistribution of software covered by the GPL (due to a per-unit patent licensing agreement, for example), that vendor loses the right to distribute the software at all...

Worse than plagiarism

Posted on March 18, 2009
Science News reports:In two investigative news stories, Adam Marcus describes the case against anesthesiologist Scott S. Reuben. This prominent Massachusetts pain researcher is accused of faking data that served as the basis for a minimum of 21 published medical studies...

Problem with Provigil?

Posted on March 17, 2009
Yahoonews reports:A so-called "smart drug" popular with young people may carry more of an addiction risk than thought, a small government study suggests. Scans of 10 healthy men showed that the prescription drug Provigil caused changes in the brain's pleasure center, very much like potentially habit-forming classic stimulants...

CAFC reverses D Del on summary judgment findings in Crown Packaging

Posted on March 17, 2009
This was a patent case in the area of ends for beverage cans: Crown and Rexam are both in the business of selling can ends and bodies to fillers associated with major beverage companies. The issue of "final judgment" arose: Even so, there must be a ?clear and unequivocal manifestation by the trial court of its belief that the decision made, so far as it is concerned, is the end of the case...

Broadcom charge on patent exhaustion against Qualcomm lacks specificity

Posted on March 17, 2009
The San Diego Union-Tribune noted: Wireless giant Qualcomm said yesterday [March 16] that it scored a victory against rival Broadcom after a federal judge threw out a patent case that sought to upend Qualcomm's licensing business model.from IDG :Judge Hayes agreed with Qualcomm: "Although Broadcom acknowledges that Qualcomm possesses thousands of patents relating to wireless chipsets and handsets, Broadcom does not identify with any specificity the patents which it requests that the court declare exhausted," he wrote...

Microsoft switching to offense in patent litigation?

Posted on March 16, 2009
John Fontana at network world writes that analyst firm Gartner said it has little doubt that Microsoft will switch to playing offense with its patent interests and that Microsoft is clearly ?beginning to treat its burgeoning patent portfolio as a revenue-generating business...

IAM blog re-cycling Lemley's "rational ignorance"?

Posted on March 16, 2009
In a 15 March 09 post titled Is it time to end patent examinations?, the IAM blog (Joff Wild) shamelessly re-cycles the old Lemley-ism presented in "rational ignorance." Bo Heiden, the deputy director of the Centre for Intellectual Property, states:In the knowledge economy patents need to take on the role of building rather than blocking...

Roche to acquire Innovatis

Posted on March 16, 2009
from GEN: Roche is taking over innovatis, a provider of automated cell analysis solutions, for ?15 million, or $19.56 million. The firm focuses on cell counting, viability testing, and cell function analysis in research as well as bioproduction.

Intellectual Ventures works on mosquito laser

Posted on March 15, 2009
From ROBERT A. GUTH at careerjournal :Its [SDI, "Star Wars} rebirth as a bug killer came thanks to Nathan Myhrvold, a former Microsoft Corp. executive who now runs Intellectual Ventures LLC., a company that collects patents and funds inventions. His old boss, Mr...

Copying of a university website

Posted on March 15, 2009
A story about the copying of the Brown University website revealed an interesting snag:Fortunately for UAH, Brown University takes an equally tolerant attitude towards the borrowed copyrighted code. According to Scott Turner, the Director of Web Communications at Brown University, his school ?viewed the similar designs as a compliment...

"Promoting intellectual discovery"

Posted on March 15, 2009
The March 6, 2009 issue of Science has an article titled--> "Promoting Intellectual Discovery: Patents Versus Markets", written by Debrah Meloso, Jerney Copic, and Peter Bossaerts. Meloso is affiliated with Bocconi University in Milan (debrah.meloso atunibocconi...

Legal associates and law reviews

Posted on March 15, 2009
Someone commented to an IPbiz post titled: Citations of blogs by law reviewsThis is part of the reason why, when I was an associate in BigLaw, I always had to suddenly go to the restroom whenever some partner said "We should write a law review article / white paper on that...

Lots of lawyers getting terminated

Posted on March 15, 2009
Karen Sloan has a piece in the 16 March 09 NLJ titled: How Do Firms Lay Off Lawyers? Very Carefully , which includes the text:Layoffs can tarnish a firm's reputation and hurt recruitment, though experts say that stigma is fading, given that firm layoffs are now widespread...

Paul Hastings gets Rule 11 sanctions in patent case

Posted on March 14, 2009
The NLJ gave some background:After losing a motion for a temporary restraining order, at which time Judge Pfaelzer raised questions about the patent's validity, ICU and its lawyers at Paul Hastings filed an amended complaint with new infringement claims...

James Greenwood on patent reform/stem cells

Posted on March 14, 2009
James Greenwood in the Miami Herald:That's why the president and Congress must protect incentives for private investment into stem-cell research and the continued development of cures and therapies. Doing so requires that they pursue public policies that balance the need to increase access to today's medicines with the need to develop tomorrow's cures...

Harvard's Simon resigns over plagiarism

Posted on March 14, 2009
Bloomberg noted on March 13: Dr. Lee Simon stepped down after the school completed a review of the charges of plagiarism, which began last year, Cameron said. Simon, a clinical professor of medicine at Harvard, also gave up his job at Beth Israel Deaconess, where he has not seen patients in at least a year, said Jerry Berger, a spokesman for the hospital...

Lithium ion battery from MIT

Posted on March 13, 2009
DailyMail: The [MIT] researchers took a conventional electrode made from lithium iron phosphate and altered its surface structure so that ions were released and absorbed 100 times more quickly than normal.A prototype made using the new technique could be fully charged or discharged in just 10 to 20 seconds...

Bloggers, promote your law blog by nominating your blog for inclusion in USLaw.com's Law Blog Directory and RSS Reader. Benefits described.