Patent Law

Cognex whips Acacia, Veritec in patent fight

Posted on May 22, 2008
The troll word came up in the discussion by Cognex about its victory over Acacia, Veritec (VCode, VData); AP reported-- Cognex Chief Executive Robert J. Shillman denounced "abusive patent trolling ... the activity of purchasing highly questionable patents from patent holders and then asserting them against well-respected and ethical corporations in the hope of extracting large monetary settlements (which are often calculated to be a bit less than the cost of litigation) ...

Another car seat patent

Posted on May 21, 2008
Following in the shoes of Steve McQueen, staff at the University of Alabama helped a Georgia dentist get a car seat patent.The Tuscaloosa News reported:?The whole purpose of the car seat is to prevent a child?s injury or death, and what does such a good job of protecting the child during the accident can actually become a problem after the accident,? said Blackmon of Rome, Ga...

Simultaneous invention, or simultaneous copying?

Posted on May 21, 2008
Of the various stories going around about simultaneous inventions (eg, Gray and Bell), one thinks back to the great similarity between the Sabrejet and the MIG-15, which became apparent during the Korean War. Of course, that similarity arose because both makers were copying from the same source, the Messerschmidt 262...

Law & Order does Eliot Spitzer story on May 21; different ending tho

Posted on May 21, 2008
In its season finale on May 21, Law & Order did its take on the Eliot Spitzer story.In the world of Law & Order, the governor (and his wife) execute a series of clever manipulations, and the governor survives (so far). The governor (in the Law & Order version) was seeing a high priced call girl (from Brazil, not New Jersey) and, in that capacity, was witness to some pertinent information, relevant to a murder investigation of McCoy and cohorts...

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More on Frenkel, Niro business

Posted on May 21, 2008
In a post titled Is the Patent Troll Tracker a reporter?, Joe Mullin discussed some of the recent back and forth between [former?] troll tracker Rick Frenkel and Ray Niro.Mike Masnick at TechDirt picked up on some of this in a post Blogging vs. Journalism Question A Key Point In Compelling The Troll Tracker To Testify which included a commentThis debate is moot...

On betting the sun will rise on May 20

Posted on May 19, 2008
May 19, 1780 was the darkest night anyone had seen. Some people could not sleep and waited through the long hours to see if the sun would ever rise again. They witnessed its return the morning of May 20. Many observed the anniversary a year later as a day of fasting and prayer.

EPO to determine in June the fate of WARF stem cell patent application

Posted on May 19, 2008
In the next month, the European Patent Office [EPO] will rule on whether inventions involving human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) can be patented.Peter Ranscombe of the Scotsman reported:The enlarged board of appeal (EBA) of the EPO is due to meet in Munich on June 24 and June 25 to consider a patent application filed by Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) in 1995...

Does Petra Moser show patents encourage successful innovation?

Posted on May 16, 2008
The work of Petra Moser on patents was summarized by LIOR JACOB STRAHILEVITZ in 116 Yale L.J. 1472, 1481-2 (2007):MIT's Petra Moser, for example, has examined the diffusion of innovations during the nineteenth century in two recent papers. Her 2005 paper in the American Economic Review studied the innovations that were highlighted at the 1851 and 1876 World's Fairs...

Geron stem cell study gets verbal hold from FDA

Posted on May 15, 2008
On May 14, it was announced that the FDA placed a so-called clinical hold on their proposed test of the treatment for people with spinal injuries.

Nintendo whacked with $21 million infringement verdict in Anascape case

Posted on May 15, 2008
Anascape Ltd. won a $21 million verdict against Nintendo in a lawsuit (in Lufkin, TX) that was originally filed in 2006. Nintendo spokesman Charlie Scibetta said the company will seek an appeal and expects the court to reduce the award "significantly...

Turn-it-off?

Posted on May 14, 2008
from an article by Westacott:Zack: They deserved it, man. Anyone who'd done, like, programming 101 could get around those detectors [turnitin]. Me and my roommate once wrote an app that we were hoping might take off -- we called it Turnitoff. It was cool...

"Judicial hellholes"?

Posted on May 14, 2008
IPBiz found a post at lawbeat of interest. It began:The junk science on display in the American Tort Reform Association's annual "judicial hellhole" study -- remember, Adam Liptak documented how the rankings are meaningless because the underlying survey has no actual validity, which ATRA cheerfully admitted -- now propagates itself on Forbes...

Tafas v. Dudas: May 5 and May 7

Posted on May 14, 2008
Patent Docs noted on May 7 that a notice to appeal had been filed in Tafas v. Dudas, on the USPTO's rules on continuing applications. Also, on May 7, Patently-O reported: The Patent Office has filed a notice of appeal in the case of Tafas v. Dudas. from a 7 May 2008 IPFrontline post on Tafas v...

Victoria's Secret sued for trademark infringement over "Pink" brand

Posted on May 14, 2008
Victoria's Secret, sued for patent infringement over the "Very Sexy 100-Way Strapless Convertible Bra," has been sued for trademark infringement over the "Sweet Shoppe" line of Juicy Couture (Liz Claiborne). The case is Juicy Couture Inc. v. Victoria's Secret Stores Brand Management Inc...

More on Translogic and Duffy

Posted on May 13, 2008
Harold Wegner discussed the work of John Duffy in "The Duffy Defect": In re Translogic Technology, Inc., 504 F.3d 1249 (Fed. Cir. 2007), petitioner challenges a Board decision on the basis that current Board member appointments by the Director are unconstitutional as a violation of the Appointments Clause under a manifest flaw announced by Professor John F...

Supreme Court allows verdict against Toyota/Prius stand

Posted on May 13, 2008
The Supreme Court did NOT grant cert to a petition by Toyota, leaving intact a jury verdict favoring closely held Paice LLC of McLean, Virginia. The CAFC upheld the award last year. The CAFC did tell the trial judge to revisit his order that Toyota pay $25 for every Prius, Highlander and Lexus RX400h sold.

The theory of invention, illustrated with dinosaurs and Alexander Graham Bell

Posted on May 13, 2008
The opening cartoon (captioned "the history of science is full of ideas that several people had at the same time") of a piece by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker evoked a March 30 story by MATT RICHTEL in the New York Times titled: Edison ...Wasn?t He the Guy Who Invented Everything?...

"Misbegotten preemptions" as applied to the patent quality issue

Posted on May 12, 2008
There is an editorial titled "Misbegotten Preemptions" that appears in the journal Science in May [320 Science 585]. Nominally, Donald Kennedy is criticizing a proposition: When the FDA acts, state torts must defer.Kennedy notes"First, the FDA is badly underfunded...

StemCells still going after Neuralstem

Posted on May 12, 2008
Forbes (AP) reports on May 12: Clinical-stage biotechnology company StemCells Inc. said Monday [May 12] it filed a second patent lawsuit against Neuralstem in a California federal court, alleging infringement of two patents related to human neural stem cells...

Patent reformers take the last train for the coast

Posted on May 11, 2008
Joff Wild at IAM writes of patent reform: Having been led to believe that the US patent system was fundamentally flawed and needed fixing if it was going to be fit for purpose for the 21st century, we end up finding out that the only game in town was actually a debate about how damages should be calculated in patent infringement cases and that nothing else on the table was worth doing anything about...

Places not to look for significant insight on patent policy

Posted on May 11, 2008
Slashdot cites to TechDirt citing to Stephen Kinsella on patent policy. Not exactly Tinkers to Evers to Chance.See also Kinsella's post on patent reform: insipid or not? Mike Masnick, the "emperor" with no clothes?Patent reform 2008 as a house of mirrors?

Another day in the stent patent wars

Posted on May 11, 2008
AG-IP reported on May 11:Boston Scientific Corporation announced in a press release that the Canadian Federal Court has issued judgment in a lawsuit in which Johnson & Johnson had accused the Company's NIR stent of infringing two Johnson & Johnson Palmaz patents...

The urban legend of the Duell quote continues

Posted on May 11, 2008
The second quote on Top 87 Bad Predictions about the Future on 2spare is:«Everything that can be invented has been invented.» Charles H. Duell, an official at the US patent office, 1899. Sadly, as IPBiz has noted before, this quote is an urban legend...

"Officials call it slavery" -- Newark Star Ledger, May 11

Posted on May 11, 2008
The officials called it slavery, but the enslaved defended their enslavers. Although the May 11 Star-Ledger says this was a "first," one suspects the issues were already covered in an episode of Law & Order. The enslaved did hair dressing.Well, at least New Jersey doesn't have a "Proposition 71," enslaving the taxpayers.

"Burning water" discovery tied up in patents?

Posted on May 11, 2008
KING5 in Seattle writes of the Kanzius "burning water" discovery:But scientists say the project is all tied up in the patent process, and it could take years before those possibilities are explored.IPBiz says: yeah, right....KING5 also wrote:[Rustum] Roy had his fellow engineers and students at Penn State put the so-called radio frequency generator to the test...

Quinn on Bilski (and on Duffy)

Posted on May 11, 2008
Gene Quinn, in talking about the Bilski arguments on May 8, discussed the performance of Professor John Duffy:Professor John Duffy of the George Washington University Law School argued orally on behalf of Regulatory Datacorp, Inc., one of the many amici in the case...

Abramowicz on FutureMAP

Posted on May 11, 2008
Michael Abramowicz, a member of John McCain's Justice Advisory Committee, wrote a law review article in the University of Chicago Law Review titled: Information Markets, Administrative Decisionmaking, and Predictive Cost-Benefit Analysis, which discussed issues surrounding FutureMAP, a project of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which was an experiment to determine whether information markets could improve Defense Department decisionmaking...

Patent related to Umckaloabo (Pelargonium) challenged at EPO

Posted on May 11, 2008
Native South Africans are fighting the patent of Schwabe Pharmaceuticals related to a method of extraction from Umckaloabo, also known as Pelargonium. Not text from The Times: a team of South African lawyers and environmentalists launched the challenge at the European Union Patent Office headquarters in Munich, Germany, this week...

Outsourcing legal work to India

Posted on May 11, 2008
In a May 11 article U.S. Legal Work Booms in India, the Washington Post notes:Indian workers who once helped with legal transcription now offer services that include research, litigation support, document discovery and review, drafting of contracts and patent writing...

John Whealan headed to GWU

Posted on May 10, 2008
Marcia Coyle reports: John Whealan, deputy general counsel for intellectual property law and solicitor for the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office, has joined the faculty of George Washington University School of Law as associate dean for intellectual property...

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