Intellectual Property Law

Patent Office to Reissue Narrowed Version of NeoMedia Patent

By michael

In April 2007, as part of our Patent Busting Project, we asked the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) to revisit its decision to grant NeoMedia a patent that broadly claimed to cover database lookups using things like barcodes. In October 2007, the PTO agreed to take another look, and last July, it issued an initial opinion that all 95 claims of the NeoMedia patent were invalid.

Earlier this week, the PTO announced that it intends to reissue the patent, but the reissued patent will have 89 rather than 95 claims, and those 89 claims are all narrower than the original claims. That's a win for everyone, though as you'll see if you read on, it's not at all clear that the reissued patent claims are any more novel than the original ones. At a minimum, though, the scope of the patent has been pared back, and that opens the door to new ways to "design around" the patent (that is, make design decisions that will create products or services that fall outside the scope of the patent). If you want to look at the documents from the reexamination proceedings, we've posted many of the key ones on our NeoMedia patent page.)

The rest of this post is rather detailed. It's difficult to explain what happened without a lot of details. But for those interested, let's plow ahead.

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Full post as published by Electronic Freedom Foundation - Deep Links on February 20, 2009 (boomark / email).