Today is Earth Day 2014, and with that in mind we will be taking some time today and throughout the week to take some time to look at the progress of sustainable, environmentally friendly technologies… We’ve searched the recently published patent applications and issued patents coming out of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to find the most unique innovations in the realm of recycling technologies. We’ve found an assortment regarding novel systems for improving retrieval of recyclable material, as well as new systems of recycling existing waste products… We also found some recently issued patents related to recycling technologies including a couple of original systems for recyclable collection, including one method of shredding mixed waste to remove glass, metal and other recyclables, as well as new methods of recycling disposable materials, such as artificial bait.

Hip surgeries have been taking place for at least three hundreds years, and have progressed from rudimentary surgeries to the sophisticated total hip replacement (i.e., total hip arthroplasty or THA) surgeries that are so commonplace today. Nearly two weeks ago, on Tuesday, April 8, 2014, Gene had a total right hip replacement, which went very well. With this in mind we thought it would be interesting to take a look at the evolution of hip replacement technology through the lens of issued U.S. patents.

We start our profile of Intel’s recently developed technologies with a look at our featured patent application, which discusses a novel system for managing access to a vehicle among multiple drivers. This access management system would also be able to delegate responsibilities, such as gas refueling and scheduled maintenance, as well as enable emergency access to trusted parties. Other patent applications which we noticed today discussed enhanced security measures for private data as well as home media systems for accessing segmented television content. The Intel Corporation is a major recipient of patents issued by the USPTO, and in recent weeks it has secured many interesting additions to its patent portfolio. A couple of patents relate to improved systems of thermal management in mobile electronic devices. Our interest was also piqued by one patent protecting a system of monitoring care patients residing in independent living situations.

While normally no single factor is dispositive in determining whether information has been kept secret enough to qualify as a trade secret, the focus is on determining whether reasonable efforts to preserve secrecy were employed is of paramount importance. What is reasonable will, of course, vary depending upon the resources of the company or individual claiming the trade secret and the value of the secret being protected. Notwithstanding, the failure to employ any protection protocols would suggest that the information is not a trade secret. In other words, while what is reasonable will vary, failure to do anything to protect the valuable information will not be reasonable. Said another way, reasonable efforts to preserve secrecy necessarily means that there must be at least some effort to preserve secrecy.

The purpose of the roundtables is to engage further with members of the public on the following issues: (1) the legal framework for the creation of remixes; (2) the relevance and scope of the first sale doctrine in the digital environment; and (3) the appropriate calibration of statutory damages in the contexts of individual file sharers and of secondary liability for large-scale infringement. The roundtables, which will be led by USPTO and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), will be held in Nashville, TN on May 21, 2014, Cambridge, MA on June 25, 2014, Los Angeles, CA on July 29, 2014, and Berkeley, CA on July 30, 2014. The meetings were called for in the Task Force’s Green Paper on Copyright Policy, Creativity, and Innovation in the Digital Economy released last year.

Today’s featured patent application would protect a novel system of addressing power outages when a utility network doesn’t receive notification of the event directly from customers. This system allows a utility network to scan social media posts for relevant information about outages, and then turn those posts into instructions for maintenance crews. We also discuss a few inventions related to wind turbines, including a new method for measuring lightning strike damage on wind turbine blades, and a couple of patent applications filed to protect medical monitoring technologies. Medical and healthcare innovations were a main focus during our recent search of General Electric’s recently issued patents. We were greatly interested in a couple of inventions allowing for upgrades to various medical systems and procedures, including fetal heart rate monitors and virtual colonoscopy techniques. Another GE patent protects a system of authorizing ownership of an electric vehicle during charging to prevent auto theft. We also wanted to share a final patent we noticed that discusses means of treating sour water and removing contaminants like cyanide which could be useful for communities lacking effective water treatment.

The U.S. Department of Commerce’s United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) will host a public forum on May 9, 2014 at the USPTO headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia, to solicit feedback from organizations and individuals on its recent guidance memorandum for determining subject matter eligibility of claims reciting or involving laws of nature, natural phenomena, and natural products (Laws of Nature/Natural Products Guidance). The Laws of Nature/Natural Products Guidance implemented a new procedure to address changes in the law relating to subject matter eligibility in view of recent Supreme Court precedent.

“Without a strong healthy business nothing else really matters–not even IP. A successful IP [plan] is one that follows the business and strategizes to meet its goals,” says Cynthia Raposo, Senior Vice President of Underarmour. The questions that need to be answered that go into formulating an intellectual property strategy–like when the company wants a profit, whether it is interested in attracting investors or academic collaborations or buyers, whether it will become a public or global company, what its niche in the market is, how fast developments in the field are– can’t be fully answered without not only consulting the business people, but being on the exact same page as them.

As Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, spoke about on 60 Minutes, true innovation does not come from the large corporations. Instead, it is some “graduate student” or “crazy person” that makes change, such as the obscure Wright Brothers warping the airplane wings to control flight. Without a patent system, innovators and inventors from all walks of life will be unable to safeguard their intellectual property and profit, violating a central tenet of the patent system. Penalizing the poor students and the visionaries by hindering their chance to protect their technological advances in patent litigation is not justifiable and is not right. Legislation making fundamental changes to the law to thwart innovators (and their backers) getting their say in court is highly suspect and perhaps unconstitutional. Further, in a time when Americans have lost countless manufacturing jobs and have retooled, it does not make sense to weaken something at which Americans are good: innovating and inventing.

Many, many, many patents have issued to cover the physical elements and intuitive steps to make this familiar sequence possible and increasingly reliable and refined. Mechanical elements, i.e., rotating shafts with a gears on each end, have been replaced by a toothed wheel and magnetic sensor and a wire, but the information about where the engine is in its cycle of rotation is the same… To illustrate to the lay person that just because software is the ”tool” being used to “do” things, we are still ”doing” the same things in the same ways for the same reasons. To wit: That, in the modern era, the execution of the ”useful arts” is done using software does not change what is done or the fact that it is a ”useful art”; and, the patentability thereof should be unaffected simply because we ”do” it differently now as compared with how we ”did” it then.

The featured application is a continuation of a patent application that matured into a patent for AT&T in December 2013, some 9 years after it was first filed. The file history shows that after being unable to convince the patent examiner after several final rejections AT&T appealed to the Board, which in May 2013, reversed the examiners rejections. Obviously, given that AT&T has fought so long and all the way to the Board they must believe this innovation to be of some importance. Indeed, this AT&T innovation offers a very practical service that can be applied to a variety of emergency situations. This technology involves a time-sensitive encoded artifact that is affixed to a person or object which can be scanned to communication important information in response to an emergency event.

What if (Almost) Everything You Thought You Knew About America’s “Broken” Patent System Was Wrong? What follows is the fourth and final installment in the “Myths of the Patent Wars” series. The necessary legislative effort to curb bad actors in the patent industry has been “hijacked” by a small handful of very powerful global technology companies intent on forcing broader…

The U.S. Commerce Department’s United States Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO) recently announced that Patents for Humanity is being renewed as an annual program. Started as a one-year pilot in 2012, the program recognizes businesses, inventors, non-profits, and universities who leverage their intellectual property portfolio to tackle global humanitarian challenges. The renewal was first announced on February 20 as part of the Obama administration’s ongoing commitment to strengthen the U.S. patent system.