Posts Tagged: "intellectual property"

This week in Washington, D.C., while the nation continues to deal with the fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic, some Senate committee hearings on the Federal Communications Commission’s Ligado Networks 5G decision and funding COVID-19 testing innovation have been scheduled with social distancing guidelines in place. Tech and IP-related webinars continue to be scheduled by think tanks and Brookings Institution features a couple of online events this week, one exploring developments in telehealth, another looking at China’s technological growth and aspirations of global tech dominance. 

Last week, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) issued a decision refusing to vacate a Notice of Missing Parts in U.S. Patent Application No.: 16/524,350 (the ‘350 Application), titled “Devices and Methods for Attracting Enhanced Attention”, for failure to “identify each inventor by his or her legal name” on the Application Data Sheet (ADS). The ADS listed a single inventor with the given name DABUS and the family name as “Invention generated by artificial intelligence.” DABUS stands for “Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience”. The Application listed Stephen L. Thaler as the Assignee, Applicant and the Legal Representative. The USPTO denied the petition to vacate the Notice of Missing Parts.

Earlier this year, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) established a two-part framework for applying 35 U.S.C. § 325(d), under which the PTAB may deny institution of an inter partes review (IPR) if substantially the same art or arguments previously were presented to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). This framework injects a degree of rigor into the PTAB’s discretionary Section 325(d) determinations and suggests ways that IPR participants may more effectively raise or resist Section 325(d) arguments. The framework and its practical implications are discussed below.

On April 29, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) released its 2020 Special 301 Report on Intellectual Property Protection and its 2019 Review of Notorious Markets for Counterfeiting and Piracy. The Report identifies countries and IP-related market access barriers and steps necessary to address those barriers. Section I of the Report highlights “Developments in Intellectual Property Rights Protection, Enforcement, and Related Market Access” and Section II is a Priority Watch List including country reports for countries where particular problems exist with respect to IP protection, enforcement, or market access. The Review identifies illustrative examples of online and physical markets that are alleged to have contributed to substantial trademark counterfeiting and copyright piracy activities around the world.

When did it become necessary to triangulate the news in order to figure out what was really happening in the world? Many media outlets have significantly slowed down with respect to reporting on the news and are increasingly ramping up on opinion and conjecture in its place. Why that happened isn’t terribly difficult to understand, and it is likely going to only get worse. Once upon a time there were few sources of information, with only several TV channels and a small handful of national newspapers were competing for eyeballs. The rise of the 24/7 news cycle brought on by a proliferation of cable news stations with timeslots to fill changed the dynamic. The widespread adoption of Internet technologies and the World Wide Web also made it possible for people to get news throughout the day on their own terms, again making it less necessary for those seeking news and information to go to one of the chosen few industry leading sources. Today, many get news from myriad online sources, social media platforms, YouTube videos and more. There is so much information available, it is almost easy to mistake the information that is available as news.

Recently, the Federal Circuit affirmed a decision of the Patent Trial and Appeal Board, holding that the Board correctly determined that the claims 21–24 of U.S. Patent No. 6,754,640 (’640 patent) and claims 1-20 of U.S. Patent 8,768,840 (’840 patent), both owned by Bozeman Financial LLC (Bozeman), are directed to patent ineligible subject matter under 35 U.S.C. § 101. To reach this decision, the Federal Circuit first determined the appellees, all 12 of the United States Federal Reserve Banks (Banks), to be “persons” under the America Invents Act (AIA) and, therefore, eligible to petition for post-issuance review under the AIA. See Bozeman Fin. LLC v. Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, No. 2019-1018, 2020 U.S. App. LEXIS 11315 (Fed. Cir. April 10, 2020) (Before Lourie, Dyk, and Moore, Circuit Judges) (Opinion for the Court, Moore, Circuit Judge).  

This week in Other Barks & Bites: the Supreme Court finds that Georgia’s annotated state code is ineligible for copyright protection; the Federal Circuit issues decisions reversing the PTAB on nonobviousness and Northern California on Section 101 validity; the USPTO extends filing deadlines to June 1; a complex patent trial between Cisco and Centripetal Networks will begin on May 6; the TTAB affirms refusal to register a trademark after the applicant refuses to disclaim the merely descriptive term “LABS”; the Copyright Office begins a pilot program for electronic recordation; InterDigital signs a global 5G patent license with Huawei; and Amazon reports an increase in net sales for the first quarter of 2020.

Yesterday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, in an opinion authored by Judge Moore, reversed and remanded a decision of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, which had found that certain claims of Uniloc’s U.S. Patent No. 6,993,049 were ineligible under Section 101 as being directed to an abstract idea. The Federal Circuit disagreed, holding that the claims at issue were directed to a “patent-eligible improvement to computer functionality.”

In Part I of this series we examined the mathematics exception to patentability and the historical underpinnings of its justification. In Part II, we will continue to examine the case history around patenting of mathematic principles.

It may seem odd, as unprecedented public/private sector R&D alliances work to discover and develop therapies to counter COVID-19, that some are trying to punish the companies trying to get us out of this mess. For example, House “Progressive” leaders unveiled the  “three protections”  they will try to insert in the next Congressional aid package, beginning with this: “NO EXCLUSIVITY: Pharmaceutical manufacturers should not be granted exclusivity for any COVID-19 vaccine, drug, or other therapeutic-whether it has been developed with U.S. taxpayer dollars and publicly funded, or not.” Consider the last phrase. They would take away rights to technologies developed entirely with private funding without evidence of any public need for doing so.

Every day, DJs, athletes, entertainers and influencers broadcast live on Instagram, YouTube and other similar channels. Whether you are a professional entertainer or just connecting with friends and family, broadcasting and sharing content online raises many legal issues, including intellectual property, publicity rights, commercial speech, and contractual terms of service. Accordingly, digital content creators should be cautious with what they publish. In this article, we briefly explore these topics, and provide some Dos and Don’ts for avoiding legal trouble in the United States when sharing content online.

On  April 24, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) upheld a Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) decision in In re: Rudy affirming an examiner’s rejection of a patent claim directed to “a method for fishing” as ineligible for patenting under 35 U.S.C. § 101. The CAFC concluded that the claim merely recited abstract, mental processes relating to data collection or analysis that were not eligible for patent protection.

On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Georgia et al. v. Public.Resource.Org., Inc. that a state code revision commission cannot claim copyright protection over annotated state code. The ruling upheld the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit’s 2018 decision in Code Revision Commission v. Public.Resource.Org, Inc., which reversed-in-part, vacated-in-part and remanded a lower court’s ruling in a copyright infringement case involving an annotated version of Georgia’s official state code. The decision was not a shock, but could have serious implications going forward. Here is what some members of the copyright bar had to say.

On April 28, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) issued official Patent and Trademark notices announcing that it will be further extending certain patent and trademark deadlines that fall between March 27 and May 31, to June 1, 2020 in accordance with the agency’s temporary authority under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act. The notices supersede the notices previously posted by the USPTO on March 31 and March 16, 2020. Andrei Iancu, Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the USPTO, noted that “[i]nnovation and entrepreneurship will play a key role in our fight against this pandemic, and in the upcoming recovery of our country…accordingly, the USPTO continues to assess measures to support the work of inventors and entrepreneurs during this crisis and beyond.”

Is there something in the water this week? While Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) filings were up slightly (the spike due entirely to 14 new petitions from Comcast against Rovi in their massive ongoing licensing dispute), the district courts—particularly the Texas branches—had a banner week, with 127 new filings—54 of which were filed Friday, April 24 alone. The majority, 31, were filed in Texas courts.
The 54 new complaints included a spate of filings by entities controlled by IP Edge and Leigh Rothschild, more VoIP-PAL suits, and some high-profile standard-essential patent infringement cases by Conversant Wireless against Tesla. They also included 16 new suits filed by a new entity, as described below.