Patent Law

112 Mercer Street in Princeton

Posted on January 30, 2010
Einstein House at 112 Mercer Street in Princeton, NJ.

Just-n-examiner on new count system

Posted on January 30, 2010
The just-n-examiner blog talks about "how" the USPTO is handling the new count system:For a while, examiners' production will be tracked under both the old and new count systems, with the examiner being graded based on whichever system works to their advantage...

Coming trademark fight over "Who dat"

Posted on January 30, 2010
David Cariello at The League notes a coming trademark fight over "Who Dat," related to the NFL's New Orleans Saints.WWL-TV had reported that several t-shirt shop owners had been told [by the NFL] to stop selling the shirts because the NFL owns the rights to "Who Dat" on any merchandise that might try to tie the phrase with the Saints...

Intellect Wireless sues Apple in ND Illinois

Posted on January 30, 2010
Robin Wauters at TechCrunch wrote:The complaint [filed by Intellect Wireless in ND Ill on 28 Jan 2010] states that Apple infringed on the company's patents when it provided wireless portable communication devices (you know, like the iPhone) that "receive and display caller ID information, non-facsimile pictures, video messages and/or Multimedia Messaging Services...

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IEEE opposing S.515 on patent reform

Posted on January 30, 2010
from a letter to Senator Reid from IEEE:However, we are concerned that the patent reform language of S. 515 now before Congress, while well intentioned, may not result in reducing the cost and latency of patents, and may in fact substantially impair the ability of small-sized technology companies and entrepreneurs to obtain funding, grow and create jobs, and thus compete successfully in the U...

Rosetta Genomics issues press release over patent allowance

Posted on January 29, 2010
On 29 January 2010, Rosetta issued a press release about allowances by the USPTO of claims in two patent applications:The first, covering human microRNA miR-21, was derived from the ?Tuschl III? patent series that is assigned to the Max Planck Society, Berlin, Germany and is used in Rosetta?s miRview? mets and miRview? squamous diagnostic assays...

Chemistry plagiarism at University of Kentucky?

Posted on January 29, 2010
In an editorial in the Kernel, one finds the text:according to a Jan. 25 Kernel article, reports of plagiarism are on the rise at UK. Students are especially being caught in the disciplines of English and chemistry. Although this increase could be attributed to advancements in technology that make it easier to spot plagiarism, some cases may occur because students are ignorant of proper source citation...

Interpreting license agreements can be tricky

Posted on January 29, 2010
As seen in the diverging opinions by Judge SCHALL (majority) and Judge BRYSON (dissent) in Lawler v. Bradley, determining the meaning of provisions in licenses can be tricky, yielding consequences which are not foreseeable. From the dissent: Because the License Agreement merely required written notice requesting payment of royalties in order to provide notice of default, that letter was sufficient...

Catch-22 as to FOIA request in ClimateGate?

Posted on January 28, 2010
The refusal to provide data by Jones et al. was a breach of FOIA, but no prosecution will follow. From the TimesOnLine:In a statement, Graham Smith, Deputy Commissioner at the ICO [Information Commissioner?s Office ], said: ?The e-mails which are now public reveal that Mr Holland?s requests under the Freedom of Information Act were not dealt with as they should have been under the legislation...

Only in New Jersey?

Posted on January 04, 2010
from AP:A man walked through a screening checkpoint exit into the secure side of a terminal at one of the nation's busiest airports [Newark Liberty] on Sunday night [3 Jan 2010] , and flights were grounded for hours and passengers had to be re-screened while air safety officials searched for him...

Was 1959 the year that changed everything?

Posted on January 03, 2010
In the lead story on the 3 Jan 10 "CBS Sunday Morning" titled 1959: The Year That Changed Everything, Jeff Greenfield obliquely got into issues relating to the differences between innovation (an alteration which changes the way we live) and invention (a discovery which is novel and nonobvious)...

Sometimes the system didn't work

Posted on January 03, 2010
Back in 2002, after the Jan-Hendrik Schon / Bell Labs fraud was exposed, a number of scientists proclaimed that the manner of exposure proved the "system worked."For example, David Goodstein wrote in Physics World:In this case, the system worked. Science is self-correcting, as it?s supposed to be...

Obviousness in Ex Parte Hughes at the BPAI

Posted on January 03, 2010
The blog 12:01Tuesday discusses the BPAI decision Ex Parte Hughes.Of the obviousness component, from KSR: ?Common sense teaches . . . that familiar items may have obvious uses beyond their primary purposes, and in many cases a person of ordinary skill will be able to fit the teachings of multiple patents together like pieces of a puzzle...

On science issues, more "pure science" and less spinning is what's needed

Posted on January 01, 2010
In a post titled On issues like global warming and evolution, scientists need to speak up , Chris Mooney depicts the debate on carbon dioxide / climate change as one between "mainstream researchers and skeptics."IPBiz notes that if this were all there were to the matter, the "mainstream" researchers would not have to conspire to block acceptance of "skeptic" papers or make plans to embargo journals utilized by the skeptics...

"Completely, utterly wrong"

Posted on January 01, 2010
Jay Busbee at sports.yahoo refers to "Waggle Room" as stating that the economics professors at UC/Davis were "completely, utterly wrong" in their analysis of the impact of the Woods event on the stock value of Woods' sponsors:It's a further sign that the true story here isn't the parade of women claiming liaisons, but the financial impact on Woods' sponsors and the game of golf...

"Great minds really do think alike?"

Posted on January 01, 2010
On the topic of independent creation (which is a defense to a charge of copyright infringement, but NOT to patent infringement), note the interesting post in the subject area of NASCAR. The (thoughtful) poster 4ever3 had written something, but on checking the internet, found it was already there...

Paris Hilton sued in D Wash under 35 USC 271 and 15 USC 1125

Posted on December 31, 2009
Brooke Hollow, Inc. is going after Paris Hilton and Antebi Footwear in federal court (D. Wash.) for infringement of design patent D579,642 AND a Lanham Act violation over the use of a heart-shaped comfort pad.

On issues with ndas

Posted on December 30, 2009
In the Seagate/Convolve/MIT matter over hard drive technology, one has a court filing (affidavit of Paul Galloway) which suggests bad acts by Seagate:**"According to Mr Galloway, Seagate widely disseminated Convolve's technology throughout Seagate's servo engineering community, but engineers like Mr Galloway, who were exposed to Convolve's technology, were not told that it was protected under an NDA...

"Best job in the world" not so good

Posted on December 29, 2009
FoxNews reported that the British winner (Ben Southall) of the so-called "Best Job in the World" has been stung by an irukandji jellyfish, which possesses one of the most toxic venoms on the planet. Southall won a six-month contract to serve as caretaker of Hamilton Island, Queensland, Australia, and maintains a blog ["I was feeling pretty hot and sweaty, had a headache and felt pretty sick too, together with pain in my lower back and a tightness in the chest and a really high blood pressure ? all classic symptoms of Irukandji syndrome! This was not what I?d wanted at all and had caught me little off guard to say the least ? I?m supposed to be relaxing in my last few days on Hamilton Island...

Urban legends at the Volokh Conspiracy

Posted on December 29, 2009
In a post titled The Perils of Technology Predictions, Jonathan H. Adler gives his favorite "worst" prediction:My favorite: ?Television won?t be able to hold on to any market it captures after the first six months. People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night,? Darryl Zanuck, 20th Century Fox, 1946...

The power in being the swing vote

Posted on December 29, 2009
In a post titled Four new kings of the Hill in Washington , Julian E. Zelizer of Princeton begins:Last month, Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, a strong defender of the public option for health care, warned: "I don't want four Democratic senators dictating to the other 56 of us and to the country, when the public option has this much support, that it is not going to be in it...

Service by email?

Posted on December 28, 2009
From a motion to DDC:As e-mail has become more prevalent, courts have not hesitated to allow service by e-mail, especially when the defendant lives abroad and is avoiding service. See, e.g., Rio Properties, Inc. v. Rio International Interlink, 284 F...

Problems at the Patent Office continue

Posted on December 28, 2009
Note John Farmer's article -- Leading-Edge Law: Congress made patent situation worse -- which includes the text:At the end of September, there was a backlog of more than 700,000 unexamined patent applications. The average time to get a first response from the USPTO to a patent application was 25...

Compugen's CGEN-671

Posted on December 28, 2009
Reuters reports on December 28:Compugen Ltd announced the discovery and experimental validation of a new drug target for the treatment of a type of cancer, sending its shares up as much as 41 percent in pre-market trade.The compound, CGEN-671, for the treatment of multiple epithelial tumors, is a membrane splice variant of CD55, a known drug target for gastric cancer, for which monoclonal antibody therapeutics are in clinical development by others, the Israeli biotech company said in a statement...

"CBS Sunday Morning" mentions mosquito laser on Dec. 27

Posted on December 27, 2009
There was a brief allusion to the mosquito laser on "CBS Sunday Morning" on Dec. 27.See also:http://ipbiz.blogspot.com/2009/03/intellectual-ventures-works-on-mosquito.html"Sunday Morning" also noted that the word "unfriend" was "word of the year" in 2009...

Little companies struggling with the patent system

Posted on December 27, 2009
Jeff Starck talks about the patent application backlog in Patent wait stifles release of new products:[David] Baker, for example, could put his thermal transformer on the market without a patent, but his competitors then could use his technology to make the same product without spending time or money for research and development as he did...

Nisus patent

Posted on December 27, 2009
from Intellectual Property Today:SpeedTrack filed suit today [23 Sept 09] in U.S. District Court in the Northern District of California in San Francisco against Amazon.com, Best Buy, Dell and 20 other big names in e-commerce for infringing on SpeedTrack?s U...

Arguing for free "green patents": a twice-told story?

Posted on December 26, 2009
In an opinion piece in the Christian Science Monitor titled In a Wikipedia age, should all ideas be free?, William F. Shughart II (an economics professor at UMiss) excoriates Lawrence Lessig, a law prof now at Harvard:While a ruling in Bilski and Warsaw v...

NYT on tetrodotoxin

Posted on December 25, 2009
From an article by Sean B. Carroll in the New York Times in December 2009:For instance, when puffer fish are raised in aquariums with filtered, bacteria-free water, they are nontoxic. Similarly, when Japanese newts or Panamanian frogs are raised on special diets, they lose their toxicity...

PTO snagged in Sones

Posted on December 25, 2009
The PTO took a whipping from the CAFC in In re Sones.The CAFC wrote in Sones:We do not interpret Lands? End or the law of trademarks to require that specimens of use from the Internet must always have pictures. (...)Second, the Board?s bright-line rule has no basis in trademark statute or policy...

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