Patent Law

Tilt

Posted on April 18, 2008
Peter Detkin of Intellectual Ventures, at an IP Symposium in San Jose this week: "Small inventors, defined as those entities that have less than 500 employees, are responsible for 60% of US patents, while the remaining 40% are granted to large companies...

Lazy Man Insults His Customers

Posted on April 17, 2008
The USPTO is storing up trouble. PTO honcho Jon Dudas said Wednesday that patent applications are "skyrocketing," but quality is suffering "as corporations and individuals increasingly seek to turn intellectual property into a legal asset rather than a means to technology innovation...

Hospital TV

Posted on April 17, 2008
Zenith has a couple patents (5,495,301; 5,502,513) for TV remote controls for hospital room use. Zenith sued PDI for infringement. PDI won a summary judgment of prior art invalidity on claim 1 of '301, and non-infringement on both patents. Zenith appealed...

Bank Holdup

Posted on April 17, 2008
Wells Fargo inked a software license agreement with WMR in December 2003. In 2004, a patent license agreement (PLA) followed. In early February 2006, WMR sold four patents to DataTreasury: 5,265,007; 5,583,759; 5,717,868; and 5,930,778, patents encompassing what would become federally-mandated digital check processing under the law known as Check 21...

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Sauce for the Goose

Posted on April 16, 2008
The USPTO electronic filing system (EFS) requires that all submitted pdf documents have embedded fonts. EFS provides acknowledgment receipts for all EFS customer submissions. The receipts are not compliant with EFS standards, as they don't have the requisite Arial font embedded...

Ravenous Hordes

Posted on April 16, 2008
The USPTO is hosting a webcast on Wednesday, April 30, 2008, at 3:00 p.m. ET "to discuss recent disruptions in the availability of Public PAIR" owing to "service disruptions caused by bulk downloading of data by the public, commonly referred to as 'data mining...

First Action Interview Pilot

Posted on April 15, 2008
The USPTO is launching a new pilot program granting examiner interviews prior to a first office action on the merits. The PTO claims the program will "reduce pendency and improve patent quality" by "enhancing information exchange between applicant and examiner and promoting early resolution of outstanding issues"...

Complex Work Unit Pilot

Posted on April 15, 2008
The USPTO has a new pilot program, guaranteed to become standard practice, to facilitate electronic document submission for what it calls "complex work units:" chemical structure drawings, mathematical formulae, three-dimensional protein crystalline structure data, and table data...

i-©®eaTM

Posted on April 14, 2008
The above title reads like junk email in a foreign language that your computer can't decipher. How appropriate, because that's the name of the USPTO's new curriculum to teach rug rats about intellectual property. i-©®eaTM educates educators to educate "tweens" (ages 8-11) "to be creative and invent...

Dropped Dish

Posted on April 14, 2008
The CAFC brushed off an en banc appeal rehearing request from Dish Network for a $74 million award to TiVo for patent infringement, as well as a permanent injunction. Dish had also gone the reexam route, but that only bullet-proofed the patent (6,233,389)...

Color Within the Guidelines

Posted on April 14, 2008
The USPTO recently published updated Written Description Training Materials, as a revision to training materials from 1999, to reflect changes in case law and technology....

CIP Junk

Posted on April 14, 2008
PowerOasis had a dysfunctional family of patents, notably 6,466,658 and 6,721,400. The patents claim telecommunications access via a vending machine. PowerOasis went after T-Mobile, who successfully broke the family lineage, that these CIP children weren't entitled to their parent's birth date...

Platinum Patents

Posted on April 13, 2008
Patent Hawk is delighted to announce Platinum Patents, the prosecution branch of Patent Hawk. The same folk who have been wreaking havoc on patents for years for litigation defense, facilitating monetizing patents for patent holders, and providing patent intelligence to gain an unfair competitive edge, now offer prosecution services for inventors...

Dulling the Edge

Posted on April 13, 2008
The International Federation of Professional & Technical Engineers, damning S. 1145:  It would threaten our nation's competitive edge in a number of significant ways - including allowing foreign based companies to challenge the U.S. patents of American manufacturers...

Pipeline Stage

Posted on April 02, 2008
MEC sued Texas Instruments and Intel for infringing 5,471,593, losing on summary judgment, for invalidity owing to terminally sloppy claims drafting (indefiniteness), and noninfringement. On appeal, the claims slop was sifted to definiteness, but, because the district court had properly construed "pipeline stage" as temporal, rather than positional, noninfringement was affirmed...

And = Or

Posted on April 01, 2008
Mylan tripped the ANDA wire, triggering a lawsuit from Ortho-McNeil for infringing 4,513,006, covering topiramate, an accidentally discovered anticonvulsant. Mylan got a migraine over a claim construction that defined "and" as "or." In a rare fruitless incantation, Mylan invoked the sacred patent killer Obzilla, who was scared off this episode by a rare sighting of hindsight reasoning...

Time for a Change

Posted on April 01, 2008
I read it on the World Wide Web; it must be true. The patent system is broke. Patents are being bought by fake companies who are not even doing what the patent is for. Then, these fakes, make what they call shell companies, like seashells, nobody home, with no real business but patent monkey business, sue companies that make the products we all love...

Zune Rocks

Posted on April 01, 2008
Non-patent entry; pardon my enthusiasm. Zune, the late-entry portable music player from Microsoft, is wonderful. Apple's iTunes software is aggravatingly slow, and has a clunky interface compared to Zune. iPod device controls, particularly volume, are a touch difficult while on the run (literally)...

Media "Briefing"

Posted on April 01, 2008
The Coalition for Patent Fairness hosted a media briefing conference call this morning to discuss the Patent Reform Act (S.1145), and its place on the agenda of Congress, which reconvenes next week. The briefing was brief in content, but not duration...

Thwarted

Posted on April 01, 2008
Judge James C. Cacheris in the Eastern District of Virginia, on killing the examination limits railroaded into existence by the USPTO: Because the USPTO's rulemaking authority under 35 U.S.C. § 2(b)(2) does not extend to substantive rules, and because the Final Rules are substantive in nature, the Court finds that the Final Rules are void as "otherwise not in accordance with law" and "in excess of statutory jurisdiction [and] authority...

Anti Trust

Posted on March 31, 2008
The American Antitrust Institute (aai) is a lobbyist corporation backed by undisclosed lucre, doubtlessly large corporations. Their spiritual mentor is Teddy Roosevelt: rough rider, trust buster, who once observed: "Every reform movement has a lunatic fringe...

Commissioner Cack

Posted on March 31, 2008
In an interview with C/Net News, USPTO Commissioner Jon Dudas: What's, in lots of ways, more disturbing is in over half the cases where we say this isn't patentable, people just file again and get back in line. We want to make certain that people can't apply with a very broad patent application, which they know will get rejected...

An Algorithm Shy

Posted on March 30, 2008
Australia-based Aristocrat threw away money getting gaming machine patent 6,093,102, and then threw away money trying to enforce it. Means-plus-function with no unction. From the CAFC, a crash course in means-plus-function claims for computers: the claimed function is bounded by the specifically disclosed algorithm...

Mixed Claim Types

Posted on March 29, 2008
Both the USPTO and the courts proscribe claims mixing statutory claim classes as both unpatentable subject matter under §101 and indefinite under §112 ¶2. But, as is often the case with claim construction, the line may seem fuzzy. Herein a guide....

Rogue Blogger

Posted on March 29, 2008
BeavisWeek has a well written story by Michael Orey, Busting a Rogue Blogger, about a dross patent blogger who pulled the wool for a while. "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...

Greenhorn Parade

Posted on March 29, 2008
Every competent manager knows, if you have a morale problem with the troops, step one is simple: ask the troops. Instead, Margaret Peterlin, Deputy Doodah for the USPTO, is tickled pink to ask the kids in a local bidness skool what they think....

Sound Invention

Posted on March 28, 2008
Thomas Edison has been credited with inventing sound reproduction, duly granted U.S. patent 200,521 on an 1877 filing. Newly revived is the work of "Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, a Parisian typesetter and tinkerer who went to his grave convinced that credit for his breakthroughs had been improperly bestowed on Edison...

Bum Trip

Posted on March 28, 2008
In an apparent non-sequitur, Avistar Communications is blaming Microsoft for its woes in having to slash its workforce by 25%. Avistar had hoped to license its patent portfolio to Microsoft. Ever the jester, Microsoft's response was to hoist a USPTO reexamination petard on all 29 of Avistar's patents...

Reverse Gear

Posted on March 28, 2008
After getting the hard word from a Congressman, the ITC has reversed an administrative judge's stay in pursuing Tessera's claims of infringement against Motorola, Freescale Semiconductor, Qualcomm and other DRAM suppliers....

Rats

Posted on March 28, 2008
Agrizap's 5,949,636 claims an electrocution rat killer. As CAFC Judge Moore rhapsodized: When the hapless pest makes contact with a high voltage electrode and a reference electrode, its body creates a leakage current that completes an electric circuit and triggers a generator...

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