Posts Tagged: "patent"

On June 24, 2013, 17 Members of Congress wrote a letter to Congressman Frank Wolf (R-VA) and Congressman Chaka Fattah (D-PA), who are respectively the Chairman and the Ranking Member of the Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science of the House Appropriations Committee. The letter to Congressmen Wolf and Fattah was short and to the point, saying: “We write to request your assistance in addressing the Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) recent decision to sequester user fees which fund the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). As a result, almost $150 million in inventors’ fees in Fiscal Year 2013 have been locked in USPTO’s general fund. We request that the Approrpiations Committee allow USPTO to access the sequestered user fee funds.”

Two patent applications we feature below have some interesting implications to the future of fireworks. One application would protect a kit that allows inexperienced consumers to easily set a fireworks display which is choreographed to music. Another application would provide more information to potential customers who want to view a firework in action before buying one. A number of patents issued recently by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office serve to improve safety and manufacturing efficiency for fireworks. One patent provides a new combustion chamber design for the use of propellant materials that create less smoke, while another patent provides launcher reinforcements to protect spectators if a firework is installed improperly. A final patent we feature here protects a system of manufacturing firework cylinders to prevent inconsistencies in design that occur often with current manufacture processes.

patent application needed separate treatment because the patent application explains that the innovation could be used to “detect abnormalities and transfer the information through cell-phone network…” If you let your Sci-fi mind run wild you can envision all kinds of potential uses for a technology capable of monitoring brain function to detect abnormalities. Could it, for example, know when someone is about to do something illegal or before someone might engage in self destructive behavior? As the boundaries of science and technology continue to get pushed into new realms you can certainly bet that there will be a great many technologies that will provoke significant ethical debate.

Before you decide to bash the United States patent system or teach Patents 101 in 300 words or less, please acknowledge your limited knowledge of the subject matter. Please tell your audience that your article is only part of a much larger story that can’t be covered in a single column or blog post. Above all, please do not encourage them to take actions that could have serious legal consequences. You are telling an incomplete story.

Patent Freedom’s data shows that roughly 56% of all NPE suits are brought by companies that are owned or controlled by individual inventors — the original assignees of the patents involved. If you include companies in which individual inventors receive a substantial portion of any license fees or other recoveries, the number is more like 80%. So, why all this hysteria about the evils of entities enforcing and licensing patents, rather than those manufacturing products? The answer is because the debate (if you want to call it that) serves the interests of a group of high-tech companies on the West Coast and some foreign companies who, together, have thrown hundreds of millions of dollars at political groups to influence Congress and even the President.

Crowdfunding is a proven way to get initial funding for the commercialization of an invention. Crowdfunding involves posting a project description on the internet, asking for pledges to complete the project, and if the minimum amount of pledges is received by a certain deadline, having the funds transferred to the project. On some sites, such as Kickstarter.com, if the minimum isn’t reached, you don’t get any money. On other sites, such as Indiegogo.com, if the minimum isn’t reached, you still get what you’ve raised.

Earlier today Congressman Mike Honda (D-San Jose), Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren (D-San Jose) and Congresswoman Anna G. Eshoo (D-Palo Alto) introduced the Patents And Trademarks Encourage New Technology (PATENT) Jobs Act to exempt the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) from the what they sponsors called debilitating cuts imposed by budget sequestration. Indeed, those who have followed this issue know that during the debate and ultimate passage of the America Invents Act (AIA) much was made of the ability of the USPTO to keep its fees and use them to support ongoing business operations. Written promises were made, no binding promises were enacted as part of the legislation, and few could have anticipated that so soon after the USPTO would once again be facing a budget shortfall. See Lack of Commitment to PTO Funding.

This week at IPWatchdog’s Companies We Follow series, we decide to leave the private sector and check out the recent patent applications and issued patents assigned to the University of California. This academic research system is involved with the research and development of computer, medical and energy technologies, among others.

Lexington Technology Group (LTG), an intellectual property management firm, announced on Monday that its wholly owned subsidiary, Bascom Research, filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Salesforce.com in the Northern District of California. Bascom Research is a software development company focused on building solutions for the management of complex and distributed data in healthcare and other fields. The company owns patents that relate to social networking and aspects of enterprise networking. In 2012, Bascom Research brought claims for patent infringement against five defendants, including Facebook, LinkeIn and Novell.

The recent Supreme Court decision in the Myriad case, like past decisions, did not announce a clear rule that can be extrapolated from the decision and applied in other technology areas. Consequently, the determination of what subject matter is patent-eligible continues to be unclear. Patent law specifically identifies four broad categories of subject matter—process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter—that are patent-eligible.

What’s regrettable is that the White House didn’t wait for such empirical data on patent litigation and instead rehashed the findings of discredited studies of PAE-related lawsuits and their purported economic consequences. Specifically, I mean the infamous $29 billion victims are said to have paid to patent trolls in 2011, a number that has echoed around the Internet and made it into congressional debate despite its dubious origins. The number was produced by a study that failed to adequately define just what a troll is – even universities and many manufacturers were included – and then harvested its data not from a reputable polling or academic institution but from a company that has a dog in the patent fight and profits from fueling fears about infringement lawsuits.

In Ultramercial I and II, the patentee (Ultramercial) asserted that U.S. Pat. No. 7,346,545 (the ‘545 patent) was infringed by Hulu, LLC (“Hulu”), YouTube, LLC (“YouTube”), and WildTangent, Inc. (“WildTangent”). The ‘545 patent relates to a method for distributing copyrighted products (e.g., songs, movies, books, etc.) over the Internet for free in exchange for viewing an advertisement with the advertiser paying for the copyrighted content. WildTangent’s motion to dismiss for failure to state a claim was granted by the district court based on the claimed method being patent-ineligible under 35 U.S.C. § 101