Patent Law

Boston Scientific loses big at CAFC

Posted on January 15, 2009
Boston Scientific, represented by Kenyon & Kenyon, was smoked at the CAFC on January 15: Because the court erred as a matter of law in failing to hold the ?536 patent to have been obvious, we reverse the judgment. Of the Boston Scientific arguments:Boston Scientific argues that KSR is irrelevant to this obviousness inquiry because Cordis urged no particular combination of references...

IAM blog on Shane citing Bessen?

Posted on January 15, 2009
On 14 January, MAPP released a report by Scott Shane titled ?The Likely Adverse Effects of an Apportionment-Centric System of Patent Damages.? On 15 January, the IAM blog noted:Something worth noting is that one of the sources that Shane cites with regard to his calculations of patent value is James Bessen...

Hewlett-Packard focuses on patent quality, not patent quantity

Posted on January 14, 2009
The WSJ reports of Hewlett-Packard [H-P, a member of the Coalition for Patent Fairness]:H-P has been focusing on "the quality of the patents that we seek, as opposed to the quantity," Mr. Light said. As a result, he added, H-P is seeking broad patents that relate directly to its main businesses, avoiding the costs of filing patents that may relate to more specific processes...

Barr challenges Medicis over Solodyn

Posted on January 14, 2009
FDANews reported on 14 Jan 09: Medicis Pharmaceutical has received notice that Barr Laboratories has filed an ANDA to market a generic version of Medicis? once-daily, oral acne treatment Solodyn ? a drug that is the subject of a citizen petition.See previous IPBiz post:Medicis does deal with Impax over Solodyn

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Pfizer lays off research scientists in face of Lipitor patent expiry

Posted on January 14, 2009
With Pfizer's Lipitor facing generic competition on or about Nov. 30, 2011, Pfizer announced on 13 Jan 09 the lay-off of up to 800 research scientists and expects to reduce its research staff by 5 percent to 8 percent this year. See alsohttp://ipbiz...

USPTO closed Jan. 19 and Jan. 20, 2009

Posted on January 13, 2009
Note: Monday, January 19, 2009, and Tuesday, January 20, 2009, are each a ?Federal holiday within the District of Columbia.? See MPEP 710.05 and TMEP 308. Thus, any action or fee due on these days will be considered timely if the action is taken, or the fee paid, on the next succeeding business day on which the USPTO is open, that is, Wednesday, January 21, 2009.

CAFC vacates Comiskey judgment; withdraws Comiskey opinion

Posted on January 13, 2009
The 13 Jan 09 opinion begins:Acting en banc, the court today vacated the September 20, 2007, judgment in this case, and the panel?s original opinion, which is reported at 499 F.3d 1365 (Fed. Cir. 2007), was withdrawn. The en banc court reassigned the opinion to the panel for revision...

More on ArticleOne

Posted on January 13, 2009
ArticleOne has a release on Jan. 13 which includes:Article One Partners, LLC, a global community working to legitimize the validity of patents, today announced two new Patent Studies driven by litigation and dispute surrounding Worlds.com and JSA Technologies patents...

John Squires to Chadbourne & Park

Posted on January 12, 2009
IAM has a post on the departure of John Squires from Goldman Sachs {John Squires has left his position as chief IP counsel of Goldman Sachs to become the joint head of IP at law firm Chadbourne & Park ]In a talk at Mumbai in 2007, Squires had quoted Forbes: [Rich Karlgaard (Forbes, 1997)] on Bill Gates: ?Halfway through the flight, Mr...

Japanese guv to support university patenting in iPS stem cell area

Posted on January 12, 2009
Perhaps not unrelated to the scoop of Yamanaka in iPS, the Japanese government is getting involved in iPS. Smartbrief reports:The Education, Science and Technology Ministry in Japan said it plans to support more universities and research centers in their bids to secure patents for ideas and technologies used in studies on induced pluripotent stem cells...

Lithium ion battery/Electrochemical capacitor [?]

Posted on January 12, 2009
In passing, IPBiz notes a paper in the 2005 JES: A Mathematical Model for a Lithium-Ion Battery/Electrochemical Capacitor Hybrid System , by Godfrey Sikha, et al.

Inadvertent plagiarism, again

Posted on January 12, 2009
In a discussion about plagiarism by one Neale Donald Walsch, one sees "inadvertent plagiarism" (remember Glenn Poshard?):A second explanation, which has since been removed, appeared on Jan. 8, citing a study on inadvertent plagiarism that describes a memory phenomena causing people to remember experiences that did not happen to them or the words of another as their own...

Rambus patents unenforceable

Posted on January 12, 2009
Bloomberg reports:Rambus, a designer of high-speed memory chips, may not use 12 of its patents to demand royalties from Micron Technology, a federal judge ruled. Judge Sue L. Robinson of United States District Court in Wilmington, Del., said the patents were unenforceable because Rambus destroyed documents, and called Rambus?s conduct ?obstructive at best, misleading at worst...

Chesbrough and open innovation

Posted on January 11, 2009
IPFinance has some text by Jordan S. Hatcher on Henry Chesbrough on open innovation.See alsohttp://ipbiz.blogspot.com/2007/05/are-advances-through-open-innovation.htmlhttp://ipbiz.blogspot.com/2005/11/road-warrior-or-road-kill.htmlhttp://ipbiz.blogspot...

Gunasekera smokes Ohio University at CA6 on due process claim

Posted on January 09, 2009
InsideHigherEd reported on Jan. 9, 09:The Sixth Circuit court disagreed with the lower court on just about every point. The three-judge panel determined that Gunasekera had presented sufficient evidence to argue that graduate faculty status ? which Ohio University had never before revoked or suspended ? did indeed represent a property interest, alleging that he had lost a summer research stipend and a diminished teaching load...

22 software companies sued by IPAT in ED Texas

Posted on January 09, 2009
NetworkWorld reports: Twenty-two major software and security companies are being sued for alleged patent infringement by a little-known entity now controlling the two patents in question.Information Protection and Authentication of Texas (IPAT) filed suit on Dec...

California dreamin' or California hoaxed?

Posted on January 08, 2009
Publicity for the book The Law Market by Erin O'Hara and Larry E. Ribstein begins:Today, a California resident can incorporate her shipping business in Delaware, register her ships in Panama, hire her employees from Hong Kong, place her earnings in an asset-protection trust formed in the Cayman Islands, and enter into a same-sex marriage in Massachusetts or Canada--all the while enjoying the California sunshine and potentially avoiding many facets of the state's laws...

RPX and Light Valve (Acacia): "trolls"/NPEs uniting?

Posted on January 08, 2009
YahooNews reported of the event Acacia announced on Friday that a subsidiary called Light Valve Solutions reached a licensing agreement with RPX:Patent lawyers observing from the sidelines and those involved in the fight over light valve patents in the Northern District of Georgia said it's the first time they've seen this happen...

IPKat on root-and-branch radical restructurers and patent quality

Posted on January 08, 2009
IPKat writes: Merpel is not however convinced that better patents will cause less uncertainty and litigation than bad ones. In her opinion, the factor that triggers attacks on validity is not the quality of the patent but the view of the business challenging it as to what might happen to that business, in commercial terms, if the patent was allowed to stand...

DJ: immediacy of any threat of future injury?

Posted on January 08, 2009
Of DJ, the CAFC said:In analyzing jurisdictional questions in declaratory judgment actions, there is no bright-line rule. MedImmune, 127 S. Ct. at 771. Instead, ?the question in each case is whether the facts alleged, under all the circumstances, show that there is a substantial controversy, between parties having adverse legal interests, of sufficient immediacy and reality to warrant the issuance of a declaratory judgment...

GM survives at the CAFC over VIP in OnStar case

Posted on January 08, 2009
GM survived an appellate challenge by VIP.GM prevailed on construction, eg, For these reasons, we agree with the district court and hold that a distance offset of the type used in Defendants? systems is not a ?coordinate? as the term is used in the ?743 patent...

Chunky chemistry?

Posted on January 08, 2009
Chunking is the practice of selling individual book chapters. IPFinance notes: More conventionally, at least in a "chunking" sense, are the efforts of McGraw Hill to sell single chapters of technical titles in the chemistry area. Even more augustly, Harvard Business Publishing is offering via Amazon single chapters of 120 of its titles, each at the amount of $6...

Patent Docs post on Kubin, for which oral argument is Jan. 8

Posted on January 08, 2009
Patent Docs has a lengthy post on Kubin, being argued today (Jan. 8) at the CAFC. The beginning of the post-->The Federal Circuit will hear oral argument on Thursday for In re Kubin, a case having great significance for biotechnology patenting. At issue is the question of whether the existence in the prior art of a purified protein, combined with "routine" cloning methods, renders obvious a claim to a nucleic acid encoding the protein...

Wild on IP personalities of 2008

Posted on January 07, 2009
Joff Wild at IAM compiled a list of the IP personalities of 2008. No, the recently-resigned Jon Dudas is not on the list.Bessen and Meurer are on, with text: Bessen and Meurer did everyone a favour by raising difficult issues and forcing the patent community to think about how its world is perceived outside the bubble...

Who used the "house divided" imagery first?

Posted on January 07, 2009
IPBiz has noted that Abraham Lincoln lifted his "house divided" imagery {Springfield, June 16, 1858] from the Bible. {For axample, Dropped straight out of Guys and Dolls?Wikipedia cites from Matthew 12:25 AND notes Sam Houston had said in 1850: "A nation divided against itself cannot stand"...

Google's scanning of books

Posted on January 05, 2009
The IHT reports:A settlement in October with authors and publishers who had brought two copyright lawsuits against Google will make it possible for users to read a far greater collection of books, including many still under copyright protection.The agreement, pending approval by a judge this year, also paved the way for both sides to make profits from digital versions of books...

Open access to scientific journals

Posted on January 05, 2009
In Nov. 08, Discover named Harold Varmus one of the ten most influential people in science and wrote:Varmus?s latest challenge has been an attempt to overhaul the system of publishing research in journals so that all papers are freely available on the Internet ?instead of only by expensive subscription...

Odd plagiarism case at Tioga High in northern California

Posted on January 05, 2009
The LA Times covered a plagiarism case involving former NFL player Ryan Dutton, who became a math teacher at Tioga High School.

McCain advisor Reines pens amicus brief for Apple

Posted on January 05, 2009
In the patent policy discussion in Denver on 27 August 2008, Edward Reines spoke on behalf of Presidential candidate John McCain. In an amicus brief in the Lucent/Microsoft matter, the same Reines wrote on behalf of Apple and Oracle Corp. The Recorder wrote that the brief criticized the trial court for not tying the reasonable royalties to the actual infringement...

Boeing on patent attorneys

Posted on January 05, 2009
Peter Cohan discussing Jim McNerney of Boeing:McNerney filters hundreds of problems and opportunities down to the critical few within a period of months after taking on a new position. For instance, at GE Aircraft Engines he quickly figured out that his business plan would be at risk unless his team could figure out a way to stop competitors from making lower priced versions of its profitable spare engine parts...

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