Posts Tagged: "Guest Contributor"

The Federal Circuit reversed. Indeed, it found that the Board committed legal error by improperly relying on inherency to find obviousness and in its analysis of motivation to combine the references. The court found that the Board erred in relying on inherency to dismiss evidence showing unpredictability in the art in rejecting Honeywell’s argument that a skilled artisan would not have been motivated to combine the references with a reasonable expectation of success. It referred to an earlier opinion [citations omitted] to state that “the use of inherency in the context of obviousness must be carefully circumscribed because “[t]hat which may be inherent is not necessarily known” and that which is unknown cannot be obvious.”

“The most important change was that DTSA allowed someone claiming their trade secret was being used improperly to go into a federal court,” explained Jacoby. “In most situations, the employer and the employee in a trade secret dispute are likely to be in the same state. Usually, two citizens of the same state can’t bring a lawsuit into a federal court unless an independent basis for federal jurisdiction over the case exists. So, if my client wants to sue the business next door to his yoga school for blasting out heavy metal during his meditation classes, I literally can’t make a federal case out of it.” However, DTSA changed that rule for trade secret protection — that claim now can be brought into a federal court even if the parties are both from the same state. Up until DTSA, that only happened if you had some other jurisdictional basis to be in federal court, such as the parties were from different states and met the jurisdictional amount for a diversity claim, or perhaps if you sued under another federal statute relating to IP.

Buried in the claim language, conditional limitations may be a vulnerability in an otherwise valuable claim. A conditional limitation is a claim feature that depends on a certain condition being present. For example, when or if condition X is present, feature Y is implemented or has effect. Without condition X, feature Y may be dormant or have no effect. Patent owners should be cognizant of possible conditional limitations implications because conditional limitations may affect claim validity and infringement as discussed below in the context of recent U.S. Patent Office and Federal Circuit cases. In Ex Parte Schulhauser, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (“the Board”) held certain claims as unpatentable based on conditional limitations.

According to Ukrainian regulations, there may be several owners for one mark. But what if one of such owners decides to execute the exclusive right without the consent of the other owners? Eventually, disputes may arise, and Ukrainian courts happened to resolve one of such cases; AQUALIFT v. National Center for Medical Technologies LLC (NCMT) and NIC.UA.

The 20 years of protection afforded by a patent is intended to promote innovation by allowing inventors a chance to recoup development costs and derive a profit from their efforts. However, in the pharmaceutical industry, the practical duration of protection is often substantially shorter since obtaining a patent is just one piece—albeit a critical one–of bringing a drug to market.

As it related to the Google incident, it was first reported that a memo authored by a Google employee, titled “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber”, was being circulated among Google employees. Later that day, the memo was obtained by the media and made public. The memo’s author was identified in the press as a senior employee named James Damore. In the memo, Damore criticized the efforts of tech companies, Google included, to employ programs and hiring practices concentrating on diversity. Specifically, Damore was critical of tech company initiatives which had the goal of recruiting and employing female engineers.

At first sight Amazon´s patent portfolio is indeed remarkable, with respect to its total value as well as its development over time: the total value of the company’s patent portfolio shows a strong over-proportional growth within the past six years. Starting 2010 with about 550 patent families and € 130m, the patents have reached a total value in September 2016 an impressive total sum of € 1,15b with 4,162 alive patent families. For a company being recognized as a retailer this is indeed remarkable and shows the trend of being more and more a high tech company. This can be seen within their strong increase of total patent portfolio value but also the technical analysis.

Since U.S. patents are granted with exclusive right to exclude, the only way to realize values of inventions is licensing, suing for damages or both. This reward mechanism would depend upon corporate cultural attitude to patents. In the early time, corporations were more willing to license and buy patents. After corporations have developed a culture of using free inventions, patent owners are unable to get rewards and unable to enforce their rights due to excessive enforcement fees. Thus, the only way to recover tiny values is selling patents to enforcement firms… All inventions are rare birds that cannot be mass-produced like articles in production shops. Thus, the patent office must use the most inclusive fishnet with an ability to capture as many inventions as possible. Since each invention is unknown at the time of capturing, one cannot design any method to capture all good inventions. Placing any limitation in the capturing method could exclude great and even greatest inventions before the patent office even knows what would be excluded.

Giving a lawyer a critique of their work can be difficult. Yet, you cannot improve lawyer performance or achieve quality work product goals without providing feedback. In this article, I will share with you some of the things that I have learned about giving effective feedback in my years of managing lawyers with staff sizes ranging from 10 to over 2,000.

Roku offers 5,000 streaming channels through its Channel Store and, to help consumers find interesting content more easily, it has developed a channel-targeting technology protected by U.S. Patent No. 8627388 titled Method and Apparatus for Channel Prioritization. This patent protects a method by which the maximum amount of channels that the client device can use are filled with available channels of targeted content, usually based on the most popular channels or those channels which are accessed most often by the client device. The increasingly large amount of data, video, audio, and gaming options that Roku users can choose from makes it harder for the user to find favored content from a desired content provider. The problem is exacerbated by the different ways a user can access content such as renting, buying or subscribing to content. The method this patent protects manages content in a streaming media environment and runs a preloaded channel in the background to reduce lag.

The USPTO issued Examination Guide 01-17 on Monday, June 26, 2017, entitled “Examination Guidance for Section 2(a)’s Disparagement Provision after Matal v. Tam and Examination for Compliance with Section 2(a)’s Scandalousness Provision While Constitutionality Remains in Question.” This Guide explains how trademark applications with arguably disparaging or scandalous content will be examined in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision in Matal… The Supreme Court’s ruling in Matal cleared the way for a slew of new and possibly offensive trademark applications of a kind that have been consistently denied since 1946. Whether this protection will be extended to a wider category of potentially incendiary marks hinges on the Federal Court’s pending review of Brunetti.

Legal protection for databases in Canada is, perhaps surprisingly, a little convoluted. In some jurisdictions, unique database rights have been legislated (e.g. the EU). This is not yet the case in Canada where protection instead comes from a patchwork of rights provided by different regimes. Traditional intellectual property (“IP”) rights provide some protection, but with sufficient gaps to make exclusive reliance on IP inadvisable… In the decision, the Competition Tribunal found that the information in the MLS database does not attract copyright protection. The decision sets out the Tribunal’s attempt to apply the relevant copyright case law to determine whether copyright subsists in the overall arrangement of information in the MLS database.

One promising approach is to argue that the claims are directed to a specific technological solution to a specific technological problem, as has been successful in the courts. But, even this may not be convincing, if argued in the abstract, because, after all, we are dealing with abstract ideas to begin with, and it is all too easy for an examiner to dismiss an abstract argument as “not convincing”. A concrete, bright line test can be constructed, which may sway an examiner (or appeal board, if the rejection is appealed). Articulate a specific technological problem that the claims solve or are directed to solving. Analyze the claim and cite some of the important claim limitations that are not present in the alleged abstract idea, and explain the significance of these claim limitations in terms of the technological problem and technological solution.

Virtual reality and augmented reality are catching on, and the fashion industry has taken notice. Many of today’s fashion brands are seeing their work being used in this disruptive technology. But, this has caused trademark issues for both fashion companies that want to protect their brands and fashion technology companies that want to bring those brands into the virtual reality world. Moira Lion and Jeff Greene, with the Intellectual Property Group at Fenwick & West, recently sat down with IPWatchdog to discuss how to approach VR innovations as they develop brand protection.

High novelty, high non-obviousness standard, inconvenient court venue for patent owners, and limited availability of injunction remedies, reduced damages, threaten liabilities will hurt all classes of inventors except that it has less impact on corporate inventors. The invalidation procedure will discourage inventive activities of all classes with most serious impacts on independent inventors and accidental inventors. This is one biggest class of inventors who often come up with game-changing and surprising inventions. When would-be-inventors run into problems or solutions, why would they spend time and money to make inventions, spend more money to get patents, and get the business to defend patents in endless invalidation actions? High patent quality standard forces existing professional inventors to leave their invention business and discourage young people from becoming future inventors. In this highly uncertain time with a large number of dormant epidemic diseases, one or a few inventions may save population life when vaccine is unavailable.