Posts in IP News

We must communicate effectively to be helpful. If the client isn’t listening because our delivery is ineffective or off-putting, it doesn’t matter that our legal opinion was brilliant because they will not be listening. Every interaction counts. Here are 13 tips to improve client communications.

The cult of celebrity keeps creating more and more wealth. And concurrent with protecting that, ‘Image Rights”’have been receiving a lot of publicity – as well as the attention of tax authorities. Even James Bond, Sir Sean Connery, has just discreetly protected his brand and trademarked his name. Documents filed in both the EU and the US show the veteran star is ensuring that he and he alone can profit from his name.

This year, the National Inventors Hall of Fame will be inducting a new class which includes the inventor of a dental composite material which was revolutionary for its high durability and wear resistance compared to other filling materials at that time. This Friday, May 4th, marks the 14th anniversary of the issue of one of the dental filling material patents held by Dr. Sumita Mitra, a former 3M chemical engineer responsible for the development of Filtek dental restorative material. With this patent anniversary upon us, we return again to our Evolution of Technology series to take a long view at the history of dental implants and the impact of Mitra’s contributions to this field of research.

Alston & Bird has named partner Natalie Clayton as the head of its Biotechnology, Pharmaceutical & Life Sciences Patent Litigation Team, effective immediately. Clayton has more than 10 years of experience guiding industry-leading companies through sophisticated patent litigation, as well as complex Food and Drug Administration regulatory matters.

“This is a mere change in form, not substance,” according to John White, principle lecturer in the PLI patent bar review course. “The PTO will start testing the current version of the MPEP, and stop testing the miscellaneous memos and the like that are currently tested. But all of those memos have now been incorporated into the new MPEP, so there’s no change of substance. Just a change in citations.”

On March 12, 2018, the Federal Circuit held in SimpleAir, Inc. v. Google LLC, No. 2016-2738, that a terminal disclaimer does not raise a presumption that a continuation patent is patentably indistinct from its parent patent.  In SimpleAir, the issue was whether an action asserting infringement of two patents was barred by claim preclusion or the Kessler doctrine when the same activity had been judged not infringing in earlier litigations involving other patents in the same family, all of which were related as continuations, and all of which included terminal disclaimers to the ultimate parent patent.  The Federal Circuit held that notwithstanding the terminal disclaimers, the district court could not simply rely on a presumption that the claims were patentably indistinct, and instead must compare the scope of the claims to determine whether claim preclusion or the Kessler doctrine applies. 

Thanks to a number of new Hepatitis C drugs (Sofosbuvir Ledipasvir, Ladispavir) the disease is curable for many patients. While this is an undeniable victory for patients and payers, the innovators who made this possible have been villainized and undermined. At a time when the public health community should celebrate the tremendous health benefits these breakthrough drugs have brought to patients around the world, they are instead organizing to ensure the destruction of the incentives that made these drugs a reality. A recent study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 2% – 3% of the world’s population is living with hepatitis C. The World Health Organization states that globally an estimated 71 million people have chronic hepatitis C infection and approximately 399,000 people die each year from the disease.

With data privacy concerns at the forefront in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica data scandal, it seems that Amazon isn’t completely in the clear when it comes to the security of consumer data on their platforms. Recent reports indicate that Amazon’s Mechanical Turk online worker marketplace was another platform targeted by the data collecting quiz application developed by Aleksandr Kogan, the Cambridge app developer behind the Facebook scandal. Data privacy concerns have also surfaced surrounding Amazon Web Services cloud platforms including inadvertent breaches of web-monitoring data stored on Amazon cloud services by private companies and the Pentagon alike. Amazon servers also collect voice recordings from consumers using its Alexa digital personal assistant which are also at risk of falling into the wrong hands unless a consumer manually deletes recordings through the Alexa app.

How the Federal Circuit could rule that Alice did not change the law governing § 101 is a bit of a mystery. Applying the same two-step test seems a convenient way of dodging reality. At a time when there is real momentum gathering for a legislative solution to § 101 why did the Federal Circuit choose to perpetuate a myth that Alice did nothing to change the law? Outcomes are unquestionably different as the result of Alice, and if outcomes are different how exactly is it possible that the law did not change? If the law remained the same why was Alice a clear pivotal moment in software patent history? Saying Alice did not change the law shows just how out of touch and insulated from reality the Federal Circuit has become.

What would you think if I told you that anyone from France or China or Brazil that was just thinking about some legal action in their country could come here and easily force discovery from a U.S. company, even though they couldn’t dream of getting the same information through their home courts? Crazy, right? That is exactly what has resulted from a law that’s so obscure it doesn’t even have a name, so we call it by its legal citation: 28 U.S.C. Section 1782.

There is a dangerous movement afoot; the idea that registration of your images on the blockchain is a cheap and simple alternative to registration with the United States Copyright Office. It is not…. While the costs of registration with the US Copyright Office can be significant, especially if you are shooting thousands of photos, don’t be deluded into thinking that the blockchain is some cheap cure-all for legally protecting your copyrighted work. The blockchain is not a government registry, but rather by definition is a distributed ledger without any central authority. Anyone can inscribe whatever they want in the blockchain without any legal recourse.

NCATS is working with industry to de-risk promising therapies by helping to take them further down the development pipeline. But the key ingredient remains finding a private sector partner willing and able to assume the burden of commercial development, which dwarfs the amount of money the government spent on the underlying research. This investment can only be justified if the technology has strong patent protection… There’s a reason it’s called intellectual property. Ownership of inventions in the United States of America isn’t a gift from the king but the right of a free people to securely own what they create. That’s the driver of American entrepreneurs, who with proper support will astound centralized governments run by dictators for life with what they can do when turned loose. Restoring our patent system removes the leash holding them back. After that, watch out if you’re in their way.

The word franchise is defined as an authorization granted by a government or company to an individual or group enabling them to carry out specified commercial activities… A patent is an exclusive right by nature. A patent does not give anyone the right to do anything other than to exclude someone else from doing something… So how then can a patent be a grant from the government to carry out specified commercial activities? That is simply not what a patent is, it is not what the statute says, it is not the grant provided to the patentee. To put it point blank, the Supreme Court has fundamentally altered the nature of the patent grant without reason or authority.

If an action is dismissed with prejudice for lack of standing, the defendant will be considered the prevailing party and attorney’s fees can be awarded under 35 U.S.C. § 285. The Federal Circuit also affirmed that the case was exceptional under § 285 because the court properly examined the totality of the circumstances in making its determination that Raniere litigated the case in an unreasonable manner.

Appellee Kamstrup A/S (“Kamstrup”) filed an IPR, and the Board instituted review of the challenged patent. Apator attempted to swear behind a cited prior art reference and submitted an inventor declaration and three emails with attachments to support the earlier conception date. The Board noted that there were no indicia in the body or header of the emails indicating what files were attached or what the attachments disclosed. The Board also noted that the only evidence that a file was attached to these emails was the inventor declaration. Accordingly, the Board rejected Apator’s attempt to swear behind the reference.