Information Filled Under 'uspto' Category
The Goldilocks Problem of Privacy in Public Friday, December 11th, 2009
One of the very interesting sessions at Supernova featured a pair of speakers on aspects of privacy and publicity: danah boyd on “visibility” and Adam Greenfield on “urban objects.” Together, I found their talks making me think about the functions of privacy: how can we steer the course between too much and too little information-sharing? danah pointed out the number of places we don’t learn enough
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The Goldilocks Problem of Privacy in Public
Guest Post by Brad Pedersen and Justin Woo (Read their Full Article at http://ssrn.com/abstract=1518660 ) The Patent Reform Act of 2009 would replace the current “first-to-invent” (FTI) system with a new “first-inventor-to-file” (FITF) system. While touted as a way to harmonize the US system with “first-to-file” (FTF) systems used in other countries, an experimental investigation of a matrix of two hundred typical fact patterns for two competing inventors was analyzed under all three systems (FTI, FITF and FTF) to test this assumption
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The "Matrix" for First-Inventor-To-File: An Experimental Investigation into Proposed Changes in US Patent Law
From today’s USPTO press release : WASHINGTON – The U.S. Commerce Department’s Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) will pilot a program to accelerate the examination of certain “green” technology patent applications, Secretary Gary Locke announced today. The new initiative, coming days before the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, will accelerate the development and deployment of green technology, create green jobs, and promote U.S
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USPTO To Fast-Track "Green" Patents
Guest Post by Paul Cole, Visiting Professor, Intellectual Property Law, Bournemouth University, UK On Tuesday 24 November, David Kappos made a posting on the Director’s Forum including the following statement: Some have suggested that the Office is determining obviousness in a way that stifles innovation by refusing patents for truly inventive subject matter. They’ve asked us to provide examples of non-obvious claims in view of KSR. Such examples would serve as a complement to the examples of obvious claims already in the guidelines.
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David Kappos and The Impact of KSR – a unique opportunity for our profession
Guest Post by Ted Sichelman, University of San Diego School of Law As any diligent reader of Patently-O would know , the Federal Circuit is considering en banc whether to retain the written description requirement—and, if so, in what form—in the pending case, Ariad Pharmaceuticals v. Eli Lilly & Co
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Disclosing “Related Cases” at the Federal Circuit: Eli Lilly’s Written Description “Secret”
Some months after India’s access-sharing with the European Patent Office (EPO) on the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL), the impact of which we had reported recently , the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) too now has been granted access to the database. (Image from here ) USPTO and TK from India A brief look around the USPTO TK tools section shows this will not be the first Indian database that the examiners will have access to – if the links are anything to go by, the USPTO has already been using the open databases made available by the Central Council for Research in Ayurveda and Siddha (in five volumes of Ayurvedic Pharmacopia) and – interestingly enough – the Himalaya Healthcare herbs database . Nevertheless, the TKDL should widen the scope of search significantly
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Indo-US TKDL bilateral, and TK ‘possibilities’
Annually, TIME picks the best new gadgets and breakthrough ideas of the year. This year’s list was recently published here . According to TIME, the top 5 inventions in 2009 include: 1) The NASA’s Ares Rockets; 2) The Tank-Bred Tuna; 3) The $10 Million Lightbulb; 4) The Smart Thermostat; and 5) Controller-Free Gaming. The full top-50 list, plus the 5 worst inventions of 2009, may be viewed here . Posted in Science and Technology
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Time’s 50 Best Inventions of 2009.
COLUMBUS, Ohio, November 23 – Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS), the global expert on chemical information, reports that China's patent office is now the world's leading producer of patent invention applications in chemistry. China trailed Japan's patent office, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), and the United States' patent office (USPTO) for more than a decade, but passed the USPTO
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China Leads All Nations in Publication of Chemical Patents According to CAS, the World’s Most Authoritative Publisher of Chemical Information
Thanks to Sumathi’s wizadry over Google we have for your viewing pleasure yet another Order authored by Justice Murlidhar on two very crucial provisions of the Patents Act – Section 8 & Section 47 (In this post I’ll cover only the Section 8 aspect, the Section 47 aspect will be covered in a subsequent post – for now let it suffice to say that the patentee lost the case on both sections). The Judgment can be accessed here at the website of the Delhi High Court
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Delhi High Court rules on Section 8 and 47 of the Patents Act: Lack of disclosure under S.8 = No interim injunction
Professor Janice Mueller & Daniel Brean have posted a new working-draft article on design patent protection. The article argues “that courts and the USPTO have previously unrecognized flexibility in how they apply the nonobviousness requirement to designs.” The authors recommend, inter alia , that courts (1) recognize that nonobviousness jurisprudence (e.g., KSR ) has “very limited, if any, applicability to design patentability”; (2) plant patent patentability requirements serve as a better example; (3) the perspective of a non-expert ordinary observer should be used when considering nonobviousness; and (4) design anticipation should be limited to “strict identity situations.” Read the article here .
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Design Patents: Mueller & Brean
The American University, Washington College of Law (WCL) is cosponsoring a program on November 19, 2009, titled “Patentable Subject Matter After the Bilski Oral Argument”. Per the WCL website: A Telecast by the Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property, Washington College of Law, American University and the Federal Circuit Bar Association November 19, 2009, 4:30-6:30 pm Washington College of Law, Room 603 In Bilski v. Kappos , the U.S. Supreme Court will address limitations on patentable subject matter in the context of a business method invention, analyzing a body of case law in such a way that some say could wrongly call into question the validity of many other patents and types of claims, while others argue it is not restrictive enough
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“Patentable Subject Matter After the Bilski Oral Argument” Webcast – November 19, 2009.
Ex parte Rodriguez, 08-0693 (BPAI 2009) (Precedential) fd080693.pdf In its first precedential decision since February 2009, an expanded BPAI panel has applied the Federal Circuit's 2008 Aristocrat decision in rejecting applicant's means-plus-function (MPF) claims as indefinite for failing to provide any corresponding structures in the specification other than a general purpose computer. From Aristocrat : For a patentee to claim a means for performing a particular function and then to disclose only a general purpose computer as the structure designed to perform that function amounts to pure functional claiming. Because general purpose computers can be programmed to perform very different tasks in very different ways, simply disclosing a computer as the structure designated to perform a particular function does not limit the scope of the claim to “the corresponding structure, material, or acts” that perform the function, as required by section 112 paragraph 6
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Precedential BPAI Opinion Rejects Functional Claim Elements as Indefinite and Not Enabled
The link to the transcript for the November 9th oral arguments before the SCOTUS in Bilski v. Kappos can be found here . Per usual, we will preface our thoughts with the following disclaimer: “It is generally a futile effort to predict how the Supreme Court will rule on any given issue.” That being said, below are some quotes that we found of particular interest: Transcript at page 7
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Bilski v. Kappos: Notable Quotes from the Oral Arguments.
By Professor John Duffy The last two decades have seen an extraordinary growth in the number of patent applications for business technologies and methods. Critics of business method patents tend to assign responsibility for this development to judicial activism by the judges of the Federal Circuit especially those responsible for the decision in State Street Bank & Trust Co.
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Business Method Patents: Technological Change, Not Judicial Activism
Pirates : The EU Parliament now has two members from the Swedish Pirate Party. The Pirates platform is based on weakening copyright laws and eliminating patents. The first line of the party website reads: “The Pirate Party wants to fundamentally reform copyright law, get rid of the patent system, and ensure that citizens' rights to privacy are respected.” [ LINK ] Billion Dollar Trade Secret Trial : The top semiconductor manufacturer in Taiwan (TSMC) sued the top mainland China semiconductor manufacturer (SMIC) for stealing its trade secrets (in state court in California).
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Patently-O Bits and Bytes
Association for Medical Pathology & ACLU v. USPTO & Myriad , 09-cv-4515 (S.D.N.Y. 2009) Earlier this year, a group of organizations and individuals filed suit against the USPTO, Myriad, and individual directors of the University of Utah Research Foundation (ex parte Young action) demanding that the breast cancer gene patents (BRCA1 & BRCA2) be found invalid or unenforceable and that the PTO's policies and practices with respect to genetic patents be declared unconstitutional.
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Challenging the Constitutionality of Gene Patents: Ass’n for Medical Pathology v. USPTO
The following guest post is by Matthew Smith The grant rate of motions to stay is highly judge-dependent and (somewhat less obviously) district-dependent. The table below shows the approximate grant rate of contested motions to stay in major patent litigation districts since about the beginning of 2008. These data included around 150 motions, after excluding follow-on or duplicate motions on the same facts (e.g., in parallel cases against different defendants), stipulated motions, patent-owner-initiated motions, and motions initiated by declaratory judgment plaintiffs.
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Stays Pending Reexamination
Currently, the USPTO is looking to unload about 2 petabytes (i.e., 2000 terabytes) of patent-related data sets to an outside vendor in an effort to segregate public data from the examiner systems, and to make “virtually all public information from the USPTO accessible on the Internet. ” Importantly, the PTO wants to make this information free of charge to the public, including current pay-for-service data products (e.g., XML Grants). Also, this change appears to be part of a longer-term “data dissemination solution” for allowing high-volume dissemination.
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USPTO Looks to Reduce "Stress" of Data Delivery, Seeks High-Volume Dissemination for Future
Mr David Kappos (right), Director USPTO, sworn in on August 13, 2009 From the website of US-PTO : “WASHINGTON — Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the USPTO David Kappos has signed a new Final Rule rescinding highly controversial regulations, proposed by the previous administration, that patent applicants felt unduly restricted their capacity to protect intellectual property. The regulations, which addressed the number of continuation applications as well as the number of claims that could be included within each application, were published in the Federal Register in August 2007, but were enjoined and never came into effect
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David Kappos, Director USPTO, Rescinds Controversial Patent Regulations Package
Today the USPTO announced that it has filed a joint motion with Plaintiff GlaxoSmithKline to dismiss the lawsuit related to continuation rules. From todays’ PTO press release: Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the USPTO David Kappos has signed a new Final Rule rescinding highly controversial regulations, proposed by the previous administration, that patent applicants felt unduly restricted their capacity to protect intellectual property. The regulations, which addressed the number of continuation applications as well as the number of claims that could be included within each application, were published in the Federal Register in August 2007, but were enjoined and never came into effect.
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USPTO Continuation Rules *DEAD* (More-or-Less)
The following notice from the PTO is important for any overseas patent filer having recently allowed or issued patents stemming from § 371 applications: The USPTO is in the process of correcting an error in the computer program that it uses to calculate the patent term adjustment that affects patents issuing from international applications entering the national stage as to the United States pursuant to 35 U.S.C. § 371. The USPTO’s computer program incorrectly calculates the three-year pendency provision of 35 U.S.C.
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USPTO Alert: Software Not Calculating National-Stage Patent Term Adjustments Correctly
Yesterday, the PTO published a briefing paper that was provided to the USPTO examining corps (via POPA ) on a proposal that would change the “count system” in the USPTO, which is universally blamed as being a large contributor to the current backlog. Under the current count system, examiners are paid using a modified GS schedule and earn more money through productivity “count” incentives. As examination progresses, examiners get counts to earn incentive credits at various stages.
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"That’s One Small Step . . ." Kappos Starts PTO Reform By Tweaking Examiner Productivity Metrics
USPTO Director David Kappos has announced a set of proposed changes to the patent examiner count system. The proposed changes are not dramatic, but they may have some incremental benefit of reducing RCE churning (see below). The proposal also provides for an additional hour of examination time per case with the expectation that the added time will be used up-front in an interview or in preparing a quality first office action on the merits (FAOM)
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Changing the USPTO Count System: Incrementally
Most patents currently being reexamined at the PTO are also being litigated in parallel proceedings in district court. This rise in importance of parallel reexaminations leads directly to both Constitutional controversies and practical problems. Although the Federal Circuit has nimbly attempted to avoid the problem, the truth is that both the PTO (an Article II executive agency) and the Article III Courts focus on the same question of validity of patent claims
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Using Reexaminations to Avoid Willfulness Damages
Ex Parte Azuma , Appeal 2009-003902 (BPAI, September 14, 2009) The Appellant filed a patent application which claimed, among other things, “[a] computer program product for causing a computer to translate a text in a first language into a second language, the computer program product comprising: a computer usable medium having computer usable program code embodied therewith.” The specification disclosed that storage media could be a memory, hard disk, floppy/disk drive and “various other hardware configurations” such as, a CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive.
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BPAI: 101 Rejections Shouldn’t Be Based on Implication If Hardware is Disclosed
In a speech this morning , widely heralded (and criticized ) as a call for “network neutrality,” FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski : “Why has the Internet proved to be such a powerful engine for creativity, innovation, and economic growth? A big part of the answer traces back to one key decision by the Internet’s original architects: to make the Internet an open system.” Now “open system” doesn’t mean anarchy. The Internet has rules, technical standards codified in the unassuming sounding “Requests for Comment.” As described by the author of RFC 1, Steve Crocker ( How the Internet Got Its Rules ), the RFCs were designed to help people coordinate activity, to build an interoperable network: “After all, everyone understood there was a practical value in choosing to do the same task in the same way
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The Freedom to Innovate Without Permission
I’ve moved to Boulder, Colorado, for a year with the Silicon Flatirons Center for Law, Technology, and Entrepreneurship at the University of Colorado . I’m here to research software patents and user innovation (and no, innovative methods of trolling aren’t quite what I think the Founders meant by “promote the progress of science and the useful arts.”) Boulder’s a particularly good place for this study, because along with its beautiful mountains and open spaces , it has an intense entrepreneurial community, with frequent New Tech Meetups , Ignites , and informal gatherings
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Software Patent Research in Boulder