Posts Tagged: "Judge Pauline Newman"

In a decision that is simply painful to read, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit yesterday decided in Autogenomics v. Oxford Gene Technology that a foreign patent owner cannot be made a defendant to a lawsuit seeking a declaratory judgment of invalidity, unenforceability and noninfringement.  According to the majority opinion, Oxford is a British biotechnology company…

As we continue to wait for President Barack Obama to select the next Undersecretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property (a.k.a. the Director of the USPTO), I feel compelled to make yet another nomination.  As some may know, since September 2008, I have periodically nominated various people who I thought would make a good choice for the next PTO Director, including…

Not long ago the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued a decision in Abbott Laboratories v. Sandoz, Inc., a decision that just screams for Congress to codify Rule 56 and settle once and for all the duty of candor that is owed to the Patent Office during the patent application process. To be perfectly clear, it…

Last week I was in Arlington, Virginia, teaching the PLI Patent Bar Review Course, so I was a bit out of touch with what was happening in the patent world as I tried to help a number of would-be patent attorneys and agents get through the PLI immersion course. Like clockwork, during this time out of the office the United…

EDITORIAL NOTE: This post was originally published on October 6, 2008, by the PLI Patent Practice Center Blog. It has since become unavailable, so it is been republished here on IPWatchdog.com. As the Presidential election continues to heat up it is time for me to start compiling names of those who I think are qualified to be the next Under…

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.