Patent Law

Markman hearing in Opti v. Apple in ED Texas

Posted on December 14, 2008
A blog at the San Jose Mercury News reported: Opti, a former maker of semiconductors that now makes its living licensing its intellectual property, said 10 Dec 08 it prevailed over Apple, which it has sued alleging patent infringement, in a special proceeding required under U...

The real damage from the Poshard case at SIU

Posted on December 14, 2008
From TMCNews: In the [Josephson Institute] survey, 36 percent of students said they used the Internet to plagiarize an assignment.Goodwill High School Principal John Beyer said he wasn't surprised by the results."I think students see CEOs, they see politicians, they see celebrities commit crimes and perjury and really there's not a lot of consequences, so they figure why not," Beyer said...

David Gregory on Meet the Press on 14 Dec 08

Posted on December 14, 2008
David Gregory had well-prepared questions in his debut on Meet the Press on Dec. 14 but clearly showed he won't be emulating Tim Russert in the carefully-analyzed followup. His rapidly-delivered questions were more in the vein of a reporter obtaining first-level information than of an analyst trying to expose the less-than-obvious current beneath...

Picking and choosing

Posted on December 14, 2008
A common complaint by patent applicants receiving obviousness rejections under 35 USC 103 is that the Examiner was guilty of picking and choosing references to meet claim elements. Pre-KSR, the teaching-suggestion-motivation [tsm] test was designed to cabin this tendency...

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Bob Park flails BlackLight with quote from Chu

Posted on December 13, 2008
Bob Park's 13 Dec 08 WN included:Yesterday, in the middle of the afternoon, I turned on CNN to see if there was any news. Two heads were talking about BlackLight Power, which had found "a way to extract all the energy we need from water." There was a picture of Randy Mills in the background holding something technical...

Patents aren't worth the time and money?

Posted on December 13, 2008
In a step back in time of more than 500 years, Gary Litman of the US Chamber of Commerce opines:Increasingly, innovators are deciding that patents aren't worth the time and money. And they have an alternative: They can choose to keep their breakthroughs to themselves, as trade secrets...

Grassley continues inquiry into medical ghost-writing

Posted on December 13, 2008
Duff Wilson in the 12 Dec 08 issue of the New York Times reports on an inquiry of Senator Charles Grassley to Wyeth about possible ghost written articles appearing in medical journals:letters, sent electronically Friday [Dec. 12] by Senator Charles E...

"How to invent"

Posted on December 13, 2008
Gregory T. Huang of XConomy has a post: How To Invent: Tips from Patrick Ennis of Intellectual Ventures .A baseline was set:But first, Ennis gave me a little taste of how invention sessions work at the firm. He was fiddling with the Saran Wrap on his sandwich, wondering about its material properties and how they might relate to thin-film coatings for medical stents, say...

Illogical first Office Actions?

Posted on December 13, 2008
IPWatchDog wrote: Given that examiners weave together some rather illogical and almost impossible to believe rejections, particularly in a first office action, the patent bar is stuck disclosing mountains of information that is no doubt objectively not relevant or risk the Federal Circuit ruling that any patent obtained is unenforceable for inequitable conduct...

California passes regulation forcing truck retrofit

Posted on December 13, 2008
As the disconnect between California's CIRM and California taxpayers widens, California emissions regulators are telling California truckers to walk the plank. The Los Angeles Times reports:California regulators cracked down on diesel air pollution Friday, Dec...

Gilead sues Teva over Truvada

Posted on December 13, 2008
In 2005, IPBiz discussed Emory University, Emtriva, and Truvada. Long before patent auctions became trendy, Emory University auctioned off patent rights to the highest bidder. Thus, before "middle men" such as Ocean Tomo and Ron Laurie of Inflexion Point Analytics, LLC, patent holders were identifying potential licensees and doing competitive bidding...

Differentiating patent attorneys

Posted on December 12, 2008
IPBiz noted text from a release from MarketWatch:As lead and co-counsel in jury and bench trials involving patent infringement and trade secret misappropriation nationwide, she has accrued an enviable record of success. She litigates matters in a wide range of technologies including chemistry, biotechnology, semiconductor, computer and oilfield industries...

Sanofi prevails on PLAVIX at CAFC: enantiomer patentable over racemate

Posted on December 12, 2008
As legal background:Claimed subject matter is ?anticipated? when it is not new; that is, when it was previously known. Invalidation on this ground requires that every element and limitation of the claim was previously described in a single prior art reference, either expressly or inherently, so as to place a person of ordinary skill in possession of the invention...

IP issues for small businesses

Posted on December 12, 2008
IPBiz notes the law review article titled Growing Pains: Intellectual Property Considerations for Illinois Small Businesses Seeking To Expand by William Lynch Schaller which appears in 35 Loy. U. Chi. L.J. 845.Of "employee raiding"-->When such sneak attacks are planned on company time n523 using company computers n524 or other company assets, n525 in addition to company personnel, they are especially likely to receive a chilly reception in court...

Google triumphs over ILOR

Posted on December 11, 2008
The CAFC noted:On the merits, we conclude that the district court correctly construed the sole claim limitation at issue, and did not abuse its discretion by denying iLOR?s motion for preliminary injunctive relief because noninfringement was undisputed under that construction...

A sign of the times: old and new

Posted on December 11, 2008
An article in the Sacramento Bee titled Interactive database: See who is laying off workers gives readers access to a database to see a list of the employers that have laid off the most California workers during the last two years. This is through the California Employment Development Department -- Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification [aka "WARN"] Records...

Reporting is expensive

Posted on December 11, 2008
John Gapper writes:As Mr Keller [of the New York Times] says, reporting is expensive. It requires someone to get on the phone, gather information, balance conflicting views of what has just occurred, and present the result. Papers have done this basic work for cities and states for so long that we take it for granted...

USPTO website mentions Appeal rule status

Posted on December 11, 2008
The USPTO website stated:In the December 10, 2008 edition of the Federal Register, the USPTO published an announcement noting that the final rule relating to practice before the Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences (BPAI) in ex parte appeals will not take effect on December 10 as originally scheduled...

Mylan and AlphaPharm lose on attorneys fees case

Posted on December 11, 2008
The ?777 patent of Takeda covers the anti-diabetic drug pioglitazone, for which Takeda has enjoyed commercial success under the name ACTOS®. Alphapharm and Mylan are two generic drug companies that sought approval to produce generic versions of pioglitazone under the Hatch-Waxman Act...

Meeting on Algal Biofuels at UMaryland; Chu to head DOE

Posted on December 11, 2008
One week after NBC Nightly News did a piece on biofuels from algae, there was the Algal Biofuels Technology Roadmap Workshop held at the University of Maryland Inn and Conference Center Dec. 9 and 10.Navigating to the link, one can obtain a variety of relevant papers, including a paper by Al Darzins, who was quoted by NBC Nightly News on Dec...

Handling plagiarism at Indiana University

Posted on December 11, 2008
In an article titled Cheating a problem during finals week, the Indiana Daily Student quotes Pam Freeman, Associate Dean of Students at IU:?When I meet with students, they say they knew it was wrong, they knew not to do it, but they just weren?t thinking, They were so stressed out that they took a chance, and they are regretful now that they had...

BYU/Torion sue Hitachi over mass spec patent

Posted on December 11, 2008
Deseret News reports that Brigham Young University (Provo) and Torion Technologies Inc., a closely held Utah company, assert Hitachi High-Technologies (of Schaumburg, Ill. ) NanoFrontier machines fall within the scope of claims to mass-spectrometry inventions patented by the university and licensed to Torion...

CIRM grant revived for putative human pluripotent stem cells

Posted on December 09, 2008
In a post titled Once rejected $1.7 million grant is resurrected , californiastemcellreport notes the revival of a previously-rejected grant application to CIRM. The application is RL1-00642-1: Derivation of New ICM-stage hESCs. [ICM is inner cell mass...

It fixes nitrogen, but how does it live?

Posted on December 09, 2008
Jonathan Zehr of UC/Santa Cruz noted that a newly described organism in the journal Science on 14 Nov 08 seems to be an atypical member of the cyanobacteria, a group of photosynthetic bacteria formerly known as blue-green algae. Unlike all other known free-living cyanobacteria, this one lacks some of the genes needed to carry out photosynthesis, the process by which plants use light energy to make sugars out of carbon dioxide and water...

On email confidentiality

Posted on December 09, 2008
Rebecca J. Foote has an article titled EMAIL, PRIVILEGE, CONFIDENTIAL INFORMATION AND INADVERTENT DISCLOSURES which notes:No form of communication is completely secure, as each may be lost, intercepted, or inadvertently disclosed. Case law strongly supports the conclusion that, so long as prompt action is taken to assert a claim of privilege or trade secret status, privileged information in an intercepted email or email unintentionally released by a virus sent to its author or intended recipient will be protected from use in evidence and trade secrets retain their legally protected character...

Lockyer suggests Demo Party head Torres for CIRM vice-chair

Posted on December 09, 2008
In the ongoing comedy known as California's CIRM, the head of California's Democratic Party, Art Torres, has been nominated by State Treasurer Bill Lockyer as a candidate for the vice chairmanship of the state's $3 billion stem cell agency [CIRM] to succeed Ed Penhoet...

Appeal Rule, scheduled for 10 Dec., delayed

Posted on December 09, 2008
The Appeal Rule which was set to go into effect December 10, 2008 is delayed, and will not go into effect tomorrow. A notice to be published in tomorrow's Federal Register reads as follows:The effective date for the final rule published at 73 FR 32938, June 10, 2008, is delayed, pending completion of OMB review of the proposed information collection under the PRA...

Synthes wins $7.4 million verdict over Medtronic on spinal disk patent

Posted on December 09, 2008
U.S. District Judge John Phipps McCalla on Dec. 8 ordered Medtronic to pay competitor Synthes $7.4 million in a patent infringement verdict over artificial spinal discs.Synthes might seek an injunction to force Medtronic not to sell the products, which include the Maverick, A-Mav and O-Mav brand devices...

Illinois Governor Blagojevich arrested for trying to sell Obama's Senate seat

Posted on December 09, 2008
FoxNews reported: Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich and his chief of staff John Harris were arrested Tuesday morning[Dec. 9] in Chicago on two counts each of federal corruption charges stemming from allegations Blagojevich was trying to sell President-elect Barack Obama's vacated Senate seat to the highest bidder...

Defensive publications

Posted on December 09, 2008
SecuringInnovation has the following quote from iProperty:Options for defensive publications range from traditional peer-reviewed journals to dot-com sites dedicated to online publishing. Publication in peer-reviewed journals is desirable, because such publications are important to the advancement of a scientific career, and the critical review such publications afford is important for the advancement of science...

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