Posts in IPWatchdog Articles

Those who are not familiar with patent law should not comment on patent law as if they are experts, announcing ridiculous propositions that they don’t understand.  It is silly for the many commentators and journalists out there to think that they can read a little about patent law and become conversant in the intricacies, offer opinions and suggestions and portray…

I am writing to you live from Houston, Texas, where our summer long journey across America teaching the PLI Patent Bar Review Course finds us presently.  For those who are not familiar with Houston let me give you a quick weather report.  It is EXTREMELY HOT and EXTREMELY HUMID.  Luckily we are here at the South Texas College of Law,…

As you may know, I am trying to determine the top patent blogs on the Internet, and voting for the top patent blogs is currently underway.  The plan has always been to have some fun with this, maybe get some traffic coming to IPWatchdog.com, but most importantly to try and raise the profile of what we all are doing and…

The Collegiate Inventors Competition is a national competition designed to encourage college and graduate students to be active in science, engineering, mathematics, technology, and creative invention. This prestigious challenge recognizes and rewards the innovations, discoveries, and research by college and university students and their advisors for projects leading to inventions that may have the potential to receive patent protection. Introduced…

I am pleased to report our May 2009 statistics, which show that we had over 1,000,000 pages viewed during the month! Just last month I was excited that we were closing in on half a million page views a month, and in May we had a grand total of 1,190,168 page views, for our greatest total of pages viewed since…

The United States Supreme Court granted cert. in Bilski v. Doll. This means that the last chapter on business methods and software has not yet been written, which could be good news or bad news depending upon your particular take. I have wondered out loud about allowing software patents as patentable subject matter, which I think is the right thing to do myself.

Admittedly, the selection of an Undersecretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property, a post that also carries the title of Director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office, is not as important in the greater scheme of things as many of the other posts President Obama has had to fill.  Having said that, given the unique and real challenges facing…

It has come to my attention that there is no real good way to check on the voting for Top Patent Blogs. I primarily use Mozilla Firefox and that seems to behave differently than Internet Explorer, at least with respect to this survey powered by SurveyMonkey.com. I have heard that some folks have been voting multiple times to see the…

Mike Drummond is the Editor of Inventors Digest, perhaps the most popular and widely read magazine in the innovation space.  While I like to consider myself a commentator who can type, Mike is a bona fide journalist with credentials that most only dream about.  He was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, a war correspondent in Iraq and the acclaimed author of…

As promised, we are moving forward to attempt to determine the Top Patent Blogs.  With the objective component making up Phase 1 of the Top Patent Blog selection process complete, it is now time to move forward into Phase 2, which is the voting phase.  Below are 50 patent blogs for you to choose from.  Question 1 asks which patent…

Subterranean termite detection US Patent No. 6,526,692 Issued March 4, 2003 Here is an interesting obscure patent from IPWatchdog past, but one too good to miss.  This originally caught my eye while reading the New York Times. The article in the Times is titled: Using Termite Flatulence Against Them. This all seemed like a joke, but it must be true,…

As promised I am moving forward with the Top Patent Blogs.  Originally the plan was for there to be 25, but I decided to make the list more inclusive so you will see that there are more than 25 blogs mentioned on each list.  I was also going to base Phase 1 on Technorati, but Technorati has refused to cooperate. …

There are a lot of crazies coming out of the woodwork with respect to the ACLU’s efforts to have the patent laws of the United States declared unconstitutional.  Perhaps you have heard, the ALCU is standing up for breast cancer patients because Myriad Genetics has patented genes.  How awful really.  Not that Myriad has patented genes, because that is factually…

I just spoke with Mark Malek, a patent attorney at the firm I am with – Zies Widerman & Malek.  Mark had an interesting conversation earlier today with a patent examiner who shall remain nameless.  The purpose of the call was to inquire about the status of a particular application that had been filed over 4 years ago and which…

Recently I saw one of Intel’s new TV commercials, oddly enough as I was standing in line at Dunkin Donuts waiting for a coffee. It was playing on the TV positioned perfectly for everyone in line to see, no doubt taking your mind off the wait. I thought this commercial was so awesome I grabbed my cell phone and called…