Patent Law

Burning the Ships

Posted on April 11, 2009
Marshall Phelps, Microsoft VP for IP policy and strategy, writes a first-person account of Microsoft coming to Jesus about patents in the self-serving book Burning the Ships. It's a corporate mea culpa sleight of hand, a pseudo-folksy self-absorbed Business Week as People magazine for business people book...

Trunked

Posted on April 11, 2009
Mark Felix sued car maker Honda for infringing 6,155,625, claiming a pickup truck with a storage compartment, like a car trunk. Felix had no horsepower for broad claim construction, and so died on the road: the district court granted summary judgment of noninfringement...

Tagged

Posted on April 10, 2009
Singapore-based Uniloc sued Microsoft in 2003 over 5,490,216, which claims a system for software product activation, which Microsoft uses in its Windows operating systems (XP, Windows Server 2003) and Office (XP version). '216 has a 1992 priority date...

Gimped

Posted on April 10, 2009
Acting Director John Doll sent this memo around the shop: "As you know, the USPTO has made a number of difficult budgetary decisions this fiscal year.  Among these challenging decisions is that to limit - as detailed in the attached memorandum - even revenue-generating overtime...

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

International Feel

Posted on April 09, 2009
Taking a wide-angle lens to patent enforcement, International Patent Litigation is a knowing compendium of litigation practices around the world, including numerous European countries, Japan, and the United States. Alas, China is not covered. Editor David Wilson opens the book on "developing a strategy and managing international patent litigation...

From R&D to Patentee

Posted on April 08, 2009
While big IT whines to Congress about patents being unfair to them, in the teeth of a deep recession they are not remiss to keep fueling the fire of genius. From the Wall Street Journal: Wary of emerging from the recession with obsolete products, big U...

Toll Taken

Posted on April 08, 2009
"In 2000, TransCore sued a competitor, Mark IV Industries, for infringement of several TransCore patents. That action was resolved by a settlement agreement, in which Mark IV agreed to pay $4.5M in exchange for an unconditional covenant not to sue and a release of all existing claims...

Fair

Posted on April 07, 2009
"Patent laws shouldn't pick winners and losers. Current law is not fair to IT, so something has to change... The current law is too easily abused to the detriment of high-tech. That has to change." - Silicon Valley MercuryNews. The patent laws must be slanted to favor corporations over inventors, just as financial shenanigans are socialized for the citizenry to pay, while banks too big to fail are subsidized, with the resulting profits privatized...

Foto Finish

Posted on April 07, 2009
FotoMedia is on a tear over web-based photo sharing. Four suits have been filed, two in mid-2007and two the middle of last year, totaling 66 defendants. 6,018,774; 6,542,936; and 6,871,231 asserted. Defendants are settling like flies on stink. Well over a dirty dozen have settled, the latest being Kaboose, Bubbleshare, and BabyZone...

Skating

Posted on April 06, 2009
Figuring infringement damages can be tricky. But, as with everything else, one can also be stupid about it. Heeling Sports successfully, by default judgment, sued footwear importers and distributors for infringing patents for roller skate shoes. When it came to damages, the skating terrain turned problematic...

Mapping the Territory

Posted on April 05, 2009
A patent is supposed to be an instruction manual. 35 U.S.C. §112 ¶1 requires an inventor to describe her invention "in such full, clear, concise, and exact terms" that it would "enable any person skilled in the art to which it pertains...

Pointer

Posted on April 04, 2009
Marek Kubin and Raymond Goodwin sought "a claim to a classic biotechnology invention - the isolation and sequencing of a human gene that encodes a particular domain of a protein." The BPAI found it obvious. On appeal, the CAFC wound back the clock to an earlier precedent of "obvious to try" that will march through time...

Junk Fax

Posted on April 02, 2009
A decent patent turns junky when its holder sues without due diligence. Joseph Kirsch had sent letters to Canon and Xerox about his computer fax patent, 4,816,911, in 1995. Canon didn't bother to respond, but Xerox told Kirsch no license was needed. In 2000, Kirsch sued Xerox, Canon, Ricoh and Toshiba...

Hatched

Posted on April 02, 2009
Sen. Orin Hatch (R-UT), co-sponsor of the proposed Senate Patent Act, before walking out on the Executive Meeting of the Judiciary Committee meeting in a hissy fit: "My primary purpose for doing this bill was to improve patent quality and limit unnecessary and unproductive litigation costs...

Smokin'

Posted on April 01, 2009
In its long-running patent battle with Star Scientific, R.J. Reynolds got its butt snuffed trying to put a jury trial on hold pending reexam of Star's patents. Maryland Judge Marvin J. Garbis denied RJR's motion. Trial is set for May 18. The district court had found Star's asserted patents unenforceable for inequitable conduct, a ruling overturned on appeal...

Gamed

Posted on April 01, 2009
Paul J. Bryan filed a "patent application [which] describes a 'game board and game having a touring band theme.'" He claimed "a game board and game." The examiner found an obvious combination of "a musical band-themed board game with nearly the exact structure that Mr...

Assigned?

Posted on April 01, 2009
Jack Bennett sold some patents and continuations to Vector Corrosion Technologies for $25,000. He listed them. He left a CIP out, 6,217,742. A competitor, Euclid Chemical, sought declaratory judgment that Vector didn't own '742. Slapdash Ohio district court Judge Boyko ruled that the contract assigned the whole family to Vector...

Hammered

Posted on March 31, 2009
Ocean Tomo patent auctioneer Charlie Ross on its recent event in San Francisco, where only six patent lots sold of 80 offered, with just eight others getting any bids: "I haven't talked to myself so much in years."...

Quickly Drummed

Posted on March 31, 2009
A month ago, Microsoft sued TomTom over GPS navigation patents, and file management, eight patents in all. Linux-based TomTom countersued with four of its own. Already they've settled, with TomTom paying an undisclosed sum to Microsoft for a five-year cross-license...

Stifling

Posted on March 31, 2009
Start-up Platform Solutions "developed software that turned standard servers into systems that mimicked I.B.M.'s expensive mainframes." Feeling its profits threatened, IBM sued Platform for patent infringement. Squeezed, and investors spooked, Platform was so weakened that IBM snapped up Platform for $150 million, and then killed its product...

Shadows

Posted on March 31, 2009
Cordis and Boston Scientific went after each other over intravascular stent patents, each found infringing. On appeal, not much changed, spotlighting a case where settlement was precluded only by poor judgment. Of most interest is a fine shading of when prior art isn't...

Pigs in a Poke

Posted on March 31, 2009
The phrase above refers to the clueless Congress passing patent laws without any sense of ramifications. Gene Quinn reports ringleaders in the Senate Judiciary Committee making progress on major revisions to their proposed patent reform bill. The damages provision now appears headed toward codification of the Georgia-Pacific factors, a big step forward in terms of sensibility...

The Invisible Edge

Posted on March 29, 2009
"Innovation without protection is philanthropy." - Mark Blaxill and Ralph Eckardt in The Invisible Edge. What a great book. Calling it "well written" is an understatement. Story after story that make the point, as well as entertaining to boot...

Useless But Enabling

Posted on March 27, 2009
Martin Gleave and Maxim Signaevsky tried for a patent on an antisense oligodeoxynucleotide, an organic compound. Examiner prior art rejection was upheld by the patent board. On CAFC appeal, two points were made: 1) a reference is anticipatory if enabling, regardless of utility; and 2) knowing a genus anticipates all its species if the genus is so limited that the species hold no mystery...

No Respect Sausage

Posted on March 27, 2009
"To retain respect for sausages and laws, one must not watch them in the making." - credited to Otto von Bismark. Whatever the minutia marinade of the proposed patent sausage, it has little chance of sizzling itself into law. The noise you hear are sausage grinders, Sen...

Leaky

Posted on March 25, 2009
Clock Spring sued Wrapmaster for infringing 5,632,307. '307 claims a method of gas pipe repair. Without expert affidavits, the district court found in summary judgment the patent invalid due to obviousness, rejecting a prior-use argument. On appeal, the CAFC bought Wrapmaster's showing of prior use: that Clock Spring publically demonstrated the technology in 1989, more than a year prior to filing the patent (1992)...

Feeling Taken

Posted on March 25, 2009
Slapped with millions in fees over failed patent litigation, E-Pass has served a lawsuit on its former lawyers: primary counsel Moses & Singer, along with local counsel Squire Sanders & Dempsey. New counsel James Rosen of Rosen Saba: "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...

Wastewater

Posted on March 24, 2009
Corruption is human nature, but that doesn't shoo the stink from especial weasels. Herein, another tale of litigant misconduct, omitting crucial discovery material that would have gone a long way in proving noninfringement. And, in an ongoing chronicle of feeble-mindedness at the CAFC, Judge Newman, by far the sharpest tack in the box, points out the fly in the ointment of the majority...

Dissolved

Posted on March 23, 2009
Last week's CAFC showdown over inventorship highlights the foolery of first-to-invent, an anachronism indulged in only by the U.S. All other countries in the world use a first-to-invent priority system. The next-to-last to abandon first-to-file was the Philippines, in 1997...

Going Bankrupt?

Posted on March 23, 2009
A patent is a piece of intellectual property, a mortgage granted by the patent bank, the USPTO. The patent bank has failed, owing to managerial ineptitude. Will mismanagement hurtle it towards fiscal dilemma and further alienation of its mortgage holders, or will it turn the corner, back to a more historical norm?...

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