Patent Law

Investors flee Merck after Vytorin report in NJEM

Posted on March 31, 2008
See the Forbes report: Vytorin Makes Merck And Schering Swoon.Things "other than" adverse patent results can affect the price of drug stocks.

Plagiarism code itself plagiarized?

Posted on March 31, 2008
The AP report begins: University of Texas at San Antonio [UTSA] students wanted to draft an honor code that discouraged cheating and plagiarizing. Unfortunately, it appears they copied another school's code without proper attribution.The story included: Materials from [a five year old] conference, which are used by many universities, were probably the main source of UTSA's code, Thusu said...

Lechleiter, new CEO of Lilly

Posted on March 30, 2008
BusinessWeek has a piece on John Lechleiter, who takes over as CEO of Lilly on 1 April 2008.Lechleiter moved up through Lilly quickly:Lechleiter received a bachelor of science degree summa cum laude in chemistry from Xavier University (Cincinnati, Ohio) in 1975...

Democracy at its finest?

Posted on March 30, 2008
From a report by GROMER JEFFERS of The Dallas Morning News on the Democratic primary in Texas:[Obama] can win more overall delegates in Texas even though Mrs. Clinton won the initial primary vote, as Mr. Obama's campaign claimed in a triumphant statement late Saturday...

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Two ingredients?

Posted on March 30, 2008
IPBiz noted the following description of a "two ingredient" recipe on Hungry Girl:Ingredients:One box devil's food cake mix (about 18 ounces)One 15-ounce can pure pumpkinSadly, this "advance" reminds one of a lot of the "innovation" in the IT industry...

More grist on cell phone danger

Posted on March 30, 2008
An article in The Independent begins:Mobile phones could kill far more people than smoking or asbestos, a study by an award-winning cancer expert has concluded. He says people should avoid using them wherever possible and that governments and the mobile phone industry must take "immediate steps" to reduce exposure to their radiation...

Labels (trademarks) on CBS

Posted on March 30, 2008
CBS Sunday Morning on 30 March 08 led off with a piece on "labels," which included trademark issues, without ever mentioning the word "trademark." The piece remarked that the color red was "owned" by two companies, Coca-Cola and Campbell's. There was background on the FDA, including the statutes of 1906, 1966 (Fair Packaging and Labeling Act), and 1994 (nutritional labeling)...

Non-final re-exam Office Action rejects claims of BlackBoard's '138 patent

Posted on March 30, 2008
Darlene Darcy of the Washington Business Journal wrote of an Office Action in the re-exam of BlackBoard's patent: The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office issued a preliminary decision Tuesday that would invalidate Blackboard Inc.'s patent on its e-learning management systems...

No need for patents to give incentives?

Posted on March 30, 2008
In Now there you go again, LBE wroteStrandburg et al. [21 Berkeley Tech. L.J. 1293] have relied on the research of Bessen and Meurer to state: Empirical evidence increasingly raises questions as to the extent to which patents are needed to provide incentives for research and development...

Purposeful ignorance?

Posted on March 30, 2008
A BusinessWeek article on "patent troll tracker" Rick Frenkel of Cisco titled Busting a Rogue Blogger contains the text:Cisco General Counsel Mark Chandler even cited the blog as a good independent source of information while in Washington lobbying for changes to patent law that would rein in trolls, unaware he was plugging the work of a Cisco employee...

Commercial embodiment plays role in CAFC obviousness reversal

Posted on March 28, 2008
Judge Moore, writing in AGRIZAP, INC. v. WOODSTREAM CORPORATION:Because sufficient evidence supports the jury?s verdict finding Woodstream liable for fraudulent misrepresentation and the trial evidence provides a reasonable basis for the jury?s attendant award of damages, we affirm...

Legal symposium on Bessen/Meurer book on March 29

Posted on March 28, 2008
For those interested, Paul J. Heald of the University of Georgia has convened a symposium on James Bessen and Michael J. Meurer's book Patent Failure: How Judges, Bureaucrats, and Lawyers Put Innovators at Risk on March 29 from 8 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. in Dean Rusk Hall on North Campus...

Nanotubes at USPTO Examiners

Posted on March 28, 2008
IPBiz was underwhelmed by the banality of the posts on carbon nanotubes. This thing is going nowhere fast.

Plagiarism daisy chain?

Posted on March 28, 2008
ThinkProgress has a post about how John McCain plagiarized from a speech by Admiral Timothy Ziemer, BUT the last entry is the following:It appears that Ziemer's speech may have been plagiarized from McCain. According to the McCain campaign, the senator used these lines before Ziemer -- in 1995...

Stay in Tessera case overturned by ITC; stock soars

Posted on March 28, 2008
Reuters reports: Tessera Technologies Inc on March 27 said the U.S. International Trade Commission has overturned an administrative judge's decision to stay a patent infringement case against Motorola Inc, Qualcomm Inc , Freescale Semiconductor Inc and others...

Pfizer patent chief arrested over child pornography

Posted on March 28, 2008
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested Alan Hesketh, patent director of Pfizer Inc., at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York on Wednesday, March 26. British citizen Alan Hesketh is accused of posing as a 28-year-old woman while trading hundreds of images of children engaged in sex acts...

Abraham Lincoln as patent litigator

Posted on March 28, 2008
There has been much discussion about Abraham Lincoln's patent, and of Lincoln's "fire of genius" speech, but less is said about his forays into patent litigation.Lincoln had brief exposure in defending one John Manny against the McCormick reaper patent:In 1855 Abraham Lincoln went to Cincinnati to act as co-counsel for John H...

The phonautograph of Scott de Martinville

Posted on March 28, 2008
JODY ROSEN, in an article in the New York Times titled, Researchers Play Tune Recorded Before Edison, discusses the work ofÉdouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, who recorded sounds on soot-blackened paper on April 9, 1860, using a phonautograph, a machine designed to record sounds visually, not to play them back...

What UPS can do for you -- sue you

Posted on March 27, 2008
The Trademark Blog has a post on a lawsuit [in SD NY] by UPS against a lawyer named Brown over, you guessed it, what can Brown do for you?

ATT CEO talks of ease of outsourcing

Posted on March 27, 2008
AT&T Chief Executive Randall Stephenson: "We're able to do new product engineering in Bangalore as easily as we're able to do it in Austin, Texas," he said, referring to the Indian city where many international companies have "outsourced" technical and customer support workers...

Patent reform and IBM's questionable patents

Posted on March 27, 2008
One cannot help but notice the curious squeeze being put on IBM patents in recent days. On the one hand, there is Jon Dudas talking about IBM's toilet queue patent. Nate Anderson wrote: [the patent] in many ways is symptomatic of the problems facing his office [the USPTO]...

Dudas, IBM's toilet queue patent, and patent quality

Posted on March 27, 2008
Nate Anderson at Ars Technica on March 27 wrote: At a talk today at the Tech Policy Summit in Hollywood, Dudas shed some light on why companies file such patents in the first place, and what his office hopes to do about it.Although not specific, Dudas was talking about IBM's US patent 6,329,919 titled System and method for providing reservations for restroom use (also to IBM but later withdrawn), which has been discussed on IPBiz...

On shaping the injunction in the Mircera matter

Posted on March 27, 2008
Patent Docs has a lengthy post on issues on an injunction in the Mircera matter: Court Still Cannot Decide on Amgen's Permanent Injunction, which concludesThere is some poetic justice in the possibility that the Supreme Court may have to address, and right soon, the consequences of eBay and its philosophical inclination to be parsimonious with regard to patent rights...

Non-producer sues thirty defendants

Posted on March 27, 2008
Is the "patent troll tracker" covering this one? Columbia University Professor Emeritus Gertrude Neumark Rothschild (that's a mouthful) filed a complaint last month against around 30 companies and has asked authorities to block imports into the US of a whole host of products, including Blu-ray disc [from skynews]The Register wrote:The US International Trade Commission (ITC) has named 30 companies it intends to investigate to see if products they import into the States are guilty of patent infringement...

Rambus wins over Micron et al. in ND Ca

Posted on March 27, 2008
On Wednesday, March 26, a jury in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California [ND Ca] in San Jose found that Rambus did NOT violate procedures established by memory standards-setting organization Joint Electron Device Engineering Council (JEDEC), as alleged by memory makers Micron Technology, Nanya Technology and Hynix Semiconductor...

Turnitin beats students over copyright issue in ED Va

Posted on March 26, 2008
JEFFREY R. YOUNG in Chronicle noted:Judge Claude M. Hilton, of the U. S. District Court in Alexandria, Va. [ED Va], found that scanning the student papers for the purpose of detecting plagiarism is a "highly transformative" use that falls under the fair-use provision of copyright law...

March 14 issue of Science mentions Tae Kook Kim

Posted on March 24, 2008
Science is moving slowly on the fraud by Tae Kook Kim. In a paper "Two Papers from Korean Lab Found to lack 'scientific truth'" (319 Science 1468), Science observed:KAIST launched the inquiry after scientists at Kim's company, CGK Co., had difficulty coaxing the technology, called magnetisim-based interaction capture (MAGIC), to work...

Teaching how the broken system actually moves [?]

Posted on March 24, 2008
One IPBiz reader wrote:I just got an email from Harvard stating that Prof. Lerner will be teaching a three day seminar on protecting and montizing IP. I found it ironic. Cost is 7,000.Jaffe and Lerner are the co-authors of "innovation and its Discontents"(published by Princeton University Press, the publishers of the current book by Bessen and Meuer, "Do Patents Work?"]

The politics of plagiarism

Posted on March 24, 2008
The recent plagiarism flap in North Stonington, CT reminds us that plagiarism accusations typically arise in complex situations, and get into defenses other than those simply of "didn't plagiarize." As with the Poshard matter at SIU or the Tribe matter at Harvard, the Pukas matter at North Stonington is related to political issues...

Charlie Rose turns Summers back into Harvard Prez

Posted on March 24, 2008
In March 2008, Charlie Rose has elevated Lawrence Summers to the post of current president of Harvard:A continued discussion about the purchase of Bear Stearns with former Secretary of the Treasury and current President of Harvard University, Lawrence Summers...

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