Posts Tagged: "Federal Circuit"

I am sitting in a Starbucks just outside the District of Columbia, across the river in Virginia.  I attended the oral arguments this morning at the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit regarding the matter of the United States Patent & Trademark Office v. Tafas, the appeal of the claims and continuations rules promulgated by the USPTO…

On Monday, December 2, 2008, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued a decision affirming in part the district court’s ruling in the patent dispute between Broadcomm and Qualcomm.  See Qualcomm Inc. v. Broadcom Corp.  The patent infringement case involved the consequence of silence in the face of a duty to disclose patents in a standards-setting organization.…

Tomorrow, December 5, 2008 at 10:00am the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit will hold oral arguments regarding the appeal by the United States Patent & Trademark Office of the ruling issued by Judge Cacheris of the Eastern District of Virginia, which permanently enjoined the claims and continuations rules from going into effect.  You will probably recall…

The United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit will hold oral arguments in the case between the United States Patent & Trademark Office and Dr. Tafas and GlaxoSmithKline on Friday, December 5, 2008 at 10am.  I have followed this case since the very beginning and will be in attendance in the gallery to hear the arguments.  I plan…

What is the harm in allowing software patents? Isn’t the problem that patent offices, particularly the United States Patent Office, are increasingly doing a poor job of finding relevant prior art and weeding out what is new and non-obvious from what is old and obvious? If prosecution were more meaningful, what is the harm in granting software patents? I see none because there is none. We should not tolerate intellectual dishonesty because it is expedient. The trouble is that patents are being granted on “inventions” that are not new or which are obvious. The problem is not that software presents an inherent evil.

While the Federal Circuit has not said that software cannot be patented, what they did say substantially changes the law that has prevailed over the last 10 years and will render many software patents useless. Moving forward, you can protect software, but only by protecting the machine that the software operates on, which is the way patent attorneys used to be forced to write software patent applications many years ago. What it also means is that to have any chance at protecting software with a patent you will have to be willing to spend signficant amounts of money, because simply put there is no economical way to draft patents cost-effectively given the new Federal Circuit guidelines.

Broadcom Corporation (Nasdaq: BRCM), a global leader in semiconductors for wired and wireless communications, has scored a significant victory in its ongoing patent infringement case against announced Qualcomm Incorporated (Nasdaq: QCOM).  On September 24, 2008, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit upheld a unanimous jury verdict that Qualcomm cellular chips and software infringe two Broadcom® patents, and upheld the injunction entered…

On Monday, September 22, 2008, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit decided the much anticipated design patent case – Egyptian Goddess v. Torkiya.   This decision is quite important because it changes the law applicable to design patent infringement litigation, and because all of the judges of the Court heard the case together and all agreed! …

The United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, the chief patent law court in the United States, today issued an Order setting In re Bilski for rehearing en banc, which means that it will be reheard by the entire court.  The original hearing in Bilski was on October 1, 2007, in front of a three judge panel, which…