Posts in Patents

The halls of the USPTO are largely populated by Google’s recent innovations, as this corporation will regularly receive upwards of 50 patents or more each week…. The featured patent application for today highlights a novel system of using mobile devices to improve something millions of Americans do every day: order out for food. This Internet-based system of ordering enables more precise delivery, better estimation of arrival times as well as secure payments for food and other items. We also profile some patent applications pertaining to speech recognition technologies and online searches for flight itineraries. Google has one of the strongest patent portfolios among American technological firms, and we’ve uncovered a list of recently issued patents from the USPTO that improve the user experience for online and mobile technologies. We discuss three patents that protect new ways of interacting with a smartphone through novel gestures, including a system that can convert words from an image into digital text. We also look into a patent that protects new methods of ranking news stories online for the Google News reader.

Last week ZDNet ran an article about how Kaspersky Lab took on and prevailed against Lodsys, one of the more notorious patent trolls operating presently. Lodsys first appeared on the scene several months ago when it started chasing Apple App Developers and demanding that they take a license to the Lodsys patent portfolio, and then later going after Google Developers who provide Apps for the Android operating system. Essentially, the model followed by Lodsys is to sue everyone, big and small and everywhere in between. Lodsys purchased its patents from Intellectual Ventures, who as they were amassing a giant patent portfolio lead the industry to believe it was for the benevolent purpose of taking patents out of the hands of patent trolls, thereby insulating them from such lawsuits. IV has at times found it easier to sell patents to willing patent trolls or has used various shell companies, but also now files lawsuits of their own.

In recent years the registration exam to practice before the United States Patent and Trademark Office has undergone significant change… There will be yet another update to the USPTO registration exam at the end of January 2014. The updated examination will additionally cover: (1) First-Inventor-to-File Final Rules; (2) Patent Law Treaties Implementation Act of 2012; and (3) Changes to Representation of Others Before the USPTO Final Rules. Thus, the exam that will be given beginning on or about January 21, 2014, will be substantially different than the examination given at the beginning of April 2011.

Those days are long gone, for nearly a decade now, but when you do take the examination you will be provided with an electronic copy of the Manual of Patent Examining Procedures. Don’t fool yourself though — the fact that this is an “open book” exam does not mean that it is easy or that you will be able to “wing it” and rely on the MPEP as a crutch. Many people have difficulty finishing the exam and it is a recipe for failure to simply plan to rely on the MPEP to get you through the exam. This is particularly true today where much of the examination is based on new material not found in the MPEP and only available in Federal Register Notices.

Perhaps the most ridiculous suggestion given (step 8) is to download the free PTO Patent Bar Exam Review Package from CNET. The WikiHow article explains that this free package contains MPEP 8th edition revisions 1 and 2. Why would you ever want to even consider the 8th edition revisions 1 and 2 when you will be tested on the 8th edition revision 9? Revision 9 was published August 2012. Revision 1 was published February 2003 and revision 2 was published May 2004. Why would anyone who is at all serious use materials that are a decade old to take an exam that is constantly being updated and refreshed with new materials? If you study the wrong MPEP edition you have absolutely NO chance to pass the patent bar exam.

While the Supreme Court has done away with the “useful, concrete and tangible result” test from State Street Bank v. Signature Financial, in Bilski v. Kappos, 8 out of 9 Justices (i.e., everyone except Justice Scalia) signed onto an opinion that recognized that the patent claims in State Street displayed patent eligible subject matter. Indeed, the dissenters in Bilski specifically acknowledged that the claims at issue in State Street did not deal with processes, but dealt with machines. See Footnote 40 of the Steven’s dissent. The import of this is that machines are specifically patent eligible subject matter, so if the claims of State Street are to machines then claims that are similarly configured would also be directed to machines and therefore patent eligible.

Watson? It is an artificially intelligent computer system that is capable of answering questions presented in natural language. It is, in essence, the modern day equivalent to the all knowing Star Trek computer. It is flat out ridiculous to be asking whether the Star Trek omnipotent computer could be patent eligible, that that is where we find ourselves because what makes the computer unique is the software that makes it possible for Watson to perform 80 trillion operations per second. But Federal Circuit Judges say that mere fact that software is fast doesn’t make it patent eligible unless there is some kind of uniqueness to the computer itself. Have we really reached the point where truly astonishing innovations, innovations once thought to be impossible, are not patent eligible? Talk about jumping the shark!

The Office of Enrollment and Discipline (OED) of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), has announced that the patent bar examination, which is sometimes called the patent registration exam or patent agent’s exam, will be updated again effective early April 2013. No date certain has yet been announced by the OED, but based on the previous updating of the exam when new rules became effective on September 16, 2012, it can be expected that the patent bar exam will be updated sometime during the first week of April.