if you ask me the Kappos legacy is not going to be the America Invents Act. The Kappos legacy will be that he managed to put the USPTO back on track. The agency is open for business and is issuing patents. It is odd to say it, but the USPTO had become so dysfunctional over the years that the allowance rate had slipped to never before seen lows. The feeling was that the USPTO was the “No Patent for You Office,” which did nothing to help foster the growth of innovation, and more importantly jobs.

A few trends were readily apparent in 2012. First, pharmaceutical patent holders in litigation fared well – in a series of cases, the Federal Circuit rejected obviousness attacks in pharmaceutical patent challenges on appeal from the district courts. Second, patent holders appealing decisions from the Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences (whether it be an original application, a reexamination, or a reissue) fared poorly – the Federal Circuit affirmed several Board decisions finding chemical patent claims obvious. While these trends are not surprising, a third more subtle trend suggests chemical patents in district court litigation may be less susceptible to invalidation for obviousness post-KSR. In 2012, when the Federal Circuit reversed the obviousness decision below on a chemical patent, those reversals favored non-obviousness three to one.

Paul Ryan is a more common name than you might think. In the world of politics when one speaks of “Paul Ryan” they are talking about the Republican Congressman from Wisconsin who was Mitt Romney’s running-mate and would-have-been Vice President. But in the intellectual property world, particularly the patent litigation world, the name “Paul Ryan” refers to the CEO of Acacia Research Technologies. It is the later Paul Ryan that went on the record with me to discuss Acacia, patent enforcement, how large companies who are infringers disregard innovative independent inventors and more.

By now you may have noticed that most successful businesses have a blog. This is no coincidence. Blogging can help you gain customers, drive traffic to your website and raise your rank in the search engine result pages. Here is a list of business blogging do’s to help you get started with your own blog.

The Batmobile namesake owners are doing battle over replicas of this very car. DC Comics, a subsidiary of Warner Bros., is pushing a lawsuit against California custom paint and auto body shop, Gotham Garage. Owned and operated by Mark Towle of Santa Ana. Gotham Garage specializes in customizing replicas of the various Batman vehicles. This lawsuit started nearly 2 years ago, when Warner Bros. claimed that Towle’s business was violating copyrights and trademarks that are owned by DC Comics.

NASA’s Space Technology Program is looking for visionary advanced concepts. This year’s annual call for NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts Program (NIAC) is seeking proposals for revolutionary concepts with the potential to transform future aerospace missions. Proposed concepts should enable new missions or significantly improve current approaches to achieve aerospace objectives. NASA expects to fund about 15 proposals up to $100,000 for nine months of study.

Apple Inc. is always applying for protections on different device designs and computer systems. As happens every once in a while, three of these 18 published patents are part of a single series; these patents pertain to linking user accounts for mobile app software to obtain upgrades. Other patent applications seek protections on applications that provide parental oversight of a child’s pre-paid debit account or aid zoom functions on picture viewing applications.

Jerk.com isn’t the worst website on the Internet by a long shot, but the arrogance with which the site is operated and seems to flagrantly disregard copyright laws is astounding. If you are going to use a DMCA Takedown Notice you should be certain that you are the copyright owner. If you are in the picture that Jerk.com uses the copyright owner would be the photographer unless you specifically obtained the underlying copyrights by assignment. So the person who should send the DMCA Takedown Notice is the copyright owner. Alternatively, have the person who took the copyright assign any and all copyrights to you before you send the DMCA Takedown Notice. This can easily be achieved by a basic copyright assignment.

I don’t believe the federal government needs to coordinate a program or embark upon studies by some blue-ribbon panel. What the federal government needs is to institute a meaningful and coherent National Manufacturing Policy that offers tax incentives to manufacturers in the U.S. The federal government also needs to substantially lessen regulatory burdens. Through simple legislative reforms America could be made to be extremely competitive. Factor in that U.S. workers are dedicated and produce high-quality products, that the products don’t need to be shipped across the world to distribute and that civil unrest is extraordinarily unlikely in the U.S., and it is easy to envision a future where manufacturing returns to America to some appreciable degree.

The final rules on patent fees will publish in the Federal Register on Friday, January 18, 2013. Fees are going up for most, but not as much as feared. It will be more expensive to file a utility patent application, except for micro-entity applicants (see Utility Filing Fees Table), but it will be less to pay the issue fee once you get a Notice of Allowance (see Issue Fee Table). It will cost 29% more to file the first RCE for large and small entities (see First RCE Fees Table), and 83% more for subsequent RCE filings for large and small entities (see Subsequent RCE Fees Table). The ex parte reexaminations fees are much lower, down 32% and 66% respectively for large and small entities (see Reexam Fees Table), but are still much higher compared to where they were prior to them being raised over 600% recently. Of course, cutting ex parte reexamination fees means the overall cost is still roughly 250% higher for small entities and 500% higher for large entities than this time last year.

In Fiscal Year (FY) 2012, the number of potentially anticompetitive patent dispute settlements between branded and generic drug companies increased significantly compared with FY 2011, jumping from 28 to 40, according to a new Federal Trade Commission staff report. The study also found that in nearly half of these settlements, branded firms may have used the promise that they would not develop or market an authorized generic (AG) as a payment to stall generic drug firms from marketing a competing product.

Tuesday’s list of issued patents published by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office includes 27 patents assigned to Cupertino, California device manufacturer Apple Inc. Each week, Apple is awarded a few patents that pertain to their electronic devices or computer systems. This week, Apple was awarded a new design patent for its laptops, as well as patents protecting methods of either creating more rugged touchscreens or finding useful social network recommendations through data analysis.

The Commission issued a Final Order that bars the POM marketers from making any claim that a food, drug, or dietary supplement is “effective in the diagnosis, cure, mitigation, treatment, or prevention of any disease,” including heart disease, prostate cancer, and erectile dysfunction, unless the claim is supported by two randomized, well-controlled, human clinical trials. The Order also prohibits misrepresentations regarding any test, study, or research, and requires competent and reliable scientific evidence to support claims about the “health benefits, performance, or efficacy” of any food, drug, or dietary supplement.

The U.S. Department of Commerce’s United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and the Smithsonian Institution have signed a Memorandum of Agreement for the USPTO to support the Smithsonian’s development of an “Innovation Pavilion” that will showcase educational programs and exhibitions about American innovation. The pavilion will be housed at the Arts and Industries (A&I) Building in Washington, DC, after the historic building’s re-opening in 2014. It will serve as a forum for public discussions, symposiums, workshops, and recognition ceremonies related to American innovation, highlighting the vital role patents play in supporting that innovation. Also, the USPTO and the Smithsonian will partner in hosting an Innovation Expo on June 20-22, 2013, at the USPTO headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia.

The USPTO Roundtable on genetic testing exposed claims that have driven the debate so far to a rare scrutiny.  Perhaps the bonfires being prepared for the accused are premature. One critic condemned universities issuing exclusive licenses as culprits responsible for preventing physician-run laboratories “that are begging to do the test” from offering competing testing services. The underlying notion appears that exclusive licensees who spend millions on test development and clinical validation actually provide shoddy lab work in practice, and that physician-run laboratories could do a better job. If so, no supporting evidence was given.