Intellectual Property Law

The World As We Knew It.

By thomason

In today’s CAFC ruling In re Translogic, the panel recalls the observations and mandates made in the KSR v. Teleflex decision.  It really is the first CAFC opinion that gives more than a quick quote or cite to the KSR case.  In the context of a reexamination decision, the CAFC panel goes further to acknowledge the sea change made by what KSR announced.  You can read it, and if you’re an EE, you’ll enjoy it more than all the pharma-patents that so often are divined by the CAFC.

With the Supreme Court’s recent patent rulings, mainly KSR, and the upcoming revamp to the USPTO rules, the practiced and litigated issues of patent law are less and less within the four corners of the entire sets of F.2d and F. Supp.  The hoped-for certainty that the CAFC would provide, reduction of forum shopping, added value to patents on U.S. technology, prevention of copying and piracy, protections for first to patent against first to mass market, etc., etc., have not been realized, or have been lost, in recent years.  Patents today cost more and are worth less.  True technologic advances are assailed as “common sense” or “obvious.”

In my efforts to blawg, many sources are considered.  In the past three months, there’s hardly been a development worth reporting.  For a patentee, or a modestly-capitalized inventor, most all of the news has been bad.  Courts and the PTO change the patent law by interpretation or regulation.  Congress gives speeches and votes non-binding resolutions.  Patent reform garners too few votes.  Maybe it’s time to change the focus of the blawg to something that matters more, or less.

Full post as published by ISinIP on October 12, 2007 (boomark / email).