Posts in IP News

Alibaba alleges that defendant Alibabacoin (ABBC) Foundation has engaged in an unlawful scheme to misappropriate the Alibaba name in order to raise over $3.5 million in cryptoassets from investors. The complaint alleges that scheme was a part of an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) that is neither registered nor approved by U.S.

Camp Invention® introduces young innovators to invention and innovation in a way that makes them relatable and fun. In the new 2018 program, campers will design a vehicle of the future, take apart a mechanical robot dog to diagnose their puppy problems and build their dream smart home. At the end of the program, each camper will bring home two personalized robots!

A statement published on the official website of Ford Motor Company (NYSE:F) indicates that the company expects to have a fully autonomous car in commercial operation by 2021. Ford believes that it will be able, by that time, to produce a vehicle which meets Level 4 automation as standardized by the engineering association SAE International. Last October, Ford CEO Jim Hackett announced that Ford will bring autonomous vehicles to a test market this year. One of the strategies the company will pursue is partnering with other companies to help bring the technology into the market, such as autonomous Domino’s pizza delivery services in Miami where the company will test how consumers interact with autonomous delivery services. Ford is investing $ 1 billion into vehicle artificial intelligence firm Argo AI to develop systems that give Ford vehicles the ability to transverse an urban environment like Miami.

Paying due homage to the TV series, The Twilight Zone, you have now entered the strange world of “shadow advocacy,” aka the amicus process. Indeed amicus advocacy has taken on increasing importance in recent years in the IP law world generally, and in the patent law world specifically, as witnessed, for example, by the Mayo, Myriad, and Alice cases which reached as high as the U.S. Supreme Court (aka, SCOTUS), as well as Sequenom’s failed petition for certiorari which garnered almost two dozen separate amicus briefs in support, including two from organizations outside the U.S. Shadow Advocacy: A Look Inside the Amicus ProcessBecause the stakes in this “shadow advocacy” world have never been higher, the amicus process has recently and unfortunately been turned sometimes into a “propaganda campaign” where briefs express not just viewpoints, but also try to influence the decision-makers, be they federal appellate judges or Supreme Court Justices, as to what those “facts” are.

Of all of the things NFL quarterback Tom Brady has been accused of ruining over the years, the internet is not necessarily at the top of the list, and certainly not based on an alleged copyright infringement that he had no part in perpetuating. Yet, a photograph of him and Danny Ainge, the general manager of the Boston Celtics, could in fact forever change the internet and online publishing as we know it.

Richardson Oliver Insights launches a suite of data and analytics solutions providing patent buyers, sellers, and executives access to patent market data covering over 120,000 patent assets and nearly 5,000 deals. The data spans hundreds of technologies and market sectors including smartphones, wireless communications, cloud computing, social networking, OLED displays, and semiconductors.

PTAB proceedings have radically changed the time to money for patent owners asserting U.S. patents against infringers. Additionally, the value of U.S. patents has dropped substantially since its peak in the 2012… Like many others, I applaud Director Iancu’s stated focus on the PTAB process and his concern about whether the U.S. patent system is fostering innovation investment and risk taking, especially for inventors, universities, and small to medium enterprises.

These issues of fairness and fair use are played out in the recent Oracle v. Google decision. In a convoluted case that has gone up to the Supreme Court once and will again, the Federal Circuit finally was able to make a ruling that the blatant, verbatim copying of computer code is not a fair use. At issue were the copying of 37 Oracle programs or apps, constituting over 11,500 lines of code, by Google for their use in the Android operating system for smart phones and other uses… In the Federal Circuit’s final analysis of the four factors, they again noted that Google could have written their own code or properly licensed with Oracle, but instead chose to copy. “There is nothing fair about taking a copyrighted work verbatim and using it for the same purpose and function as the original in a competing platform.” Accordingly, the Federal Circuit held that Google’s use of the Oracle code was not a fair use.

Today, the biggest reason to have a strict regime in place to protect trade secrets, according to Gambhir, is because technology has made misappropriation of trade secrets so much easier than ever before. Compare the days when trade secrets resided in physical forms (blue prints, coca cola formula etc.) and were stored in locked file cabinets, safes etc. with the trade secrets in the digital world. “In most situations, they may be stored in a computer file that has restricted access on a secure network,” he said. “Yet, even given all that, an unhappy employee can easily download that file on a USB drive and walk out of your building directly to your competitor’s office. Access to trade secrets has become so much easier. In turn, misappropriation has become so much easier.”

There are many reasons that it makes sense for companies, law firms and other entities with valuable IP assets to utilize legal finance. Most are well understood: The cost of litigation is rising, the IP landscape continues to be ever more fraught with risk, and fewer firms are willing to take IP matters on contingency… However, there’s another, less understood but quite compelling reason for IP litigants to use legal finance: Its positive impact on accounting outcomes. The accounting and financial reporting impact of litigation is clearly a pain point: The 2017 Litigation Finance Survey shows that a noteworthy 76% of in-house respondents identify as a business challenge that “ongoing legal expenses depress financial results.”

Intel is not the only chipmaker feeling the pinch from Apple’s decision to move away from third-party vendors for its device components. Reports from last November indicated that Apple was also planning on developing its own power management chips for use in its iPhone products… News reports have indicated that Apple has poached engineering talent from firms like Imagination and Qualcomm, including the former head of Qualcomm’s core communications chip business, in recent years. While many will tout the superior nature of Apple’s computing chip products, there will likely be few who point out the damage wrecked on the company’s suppliers and the potential of intellectual property theft which might be enabling the consumer tech giant’s attempts to further consolidate the personal computing market into its own hands.

AbbVie’s maneuver worked like clockwork to induce regulatory gridlock, which prevented generic competition and kept the company’s profits high at public expense, for years. Fortunately, the FTC would have none of it. The agency filed suit against AbbVie in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania in 2014, accusing the company of illegal monopolization under the antitrust laws. The gravamen of the FTC’s complaint was that AbbVie wrongfully filed objectively-baseless sham litigations, to block generic competition.

Daniel Miller has joined Kasowitz Benson Torres LLP as Special Counsel in the firm’s Intellectual Property Litigation group; he will be based in the firm’s Washington, DC office.

Despite being excluded from the practice of patent law before the USPTO, Kroll is openly continuing his practice. His website Invention.net is still up and running, advertising his services as specializing in patent law and having obtained thousands of patents for inventors. On Monday, April 2, 2018, an e-mail sent to [email protected] inquiring about assistance yielded a return e-mail containing advice on the need to quickly file a patent application because the U.S. is not a first to file country… Michael I. Kroll presents a very real challenge to the authority of the United States Patent and Trademark Office, and specifically to the Office of Enrollment and Discipline. If the Office is unable to stop Kroll from practicing why exactly should any practitioner concern themselves with OED? Why have any ethical rules?

35 U.S.C. § 271(e)(2) provides that it shall be an act of infringement to submit an Abbreviated New Drug Application (“ANDA”) “if the purpose of such submission is to obtain approval … to engage in the commercial manufacture, use, or sale of a drug … claimed in a patent or the use of which is claimed in a patent before the expiration of such patent.” 35 U.S.C. § 271(e)(2). The statute requires that the infringement analysis focus on what is likely to be sold following FDA approval. Bayer AG v. Biovail Corp., 279 F.3d 1340, 1346 (Fed. Cir. 2002). The governing case law holds that this hypothetical inquiry is grounded in the ANDA application itself, the materials submitted in support thereof, as well as any other relevant evidence submitted by the applicant or patent holder. However, as reflected in the below discussion of key Federal Circuit case law examining the appropriate analytical approach, and the sorts of evidence properly considered, when assessing infringement in the ANDA context, these seemingly bedrock legal principles in reality fall by the way side and, therefore, neither patentees nor ANDA applicants should allow themselves to be lulled into a false sense of security through reliance on such verbiage.