25 Oct 2013
The value of this program for the small inventor with an eye on the budget is tremendous. The program is best explained by an example. First, I will explain the patent application filing costs at the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) without this program.* Take small inventor Mark, who qualifies as a “micro-entity.” ...
21 Oct 2013
The United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed a lower court’s decision holding Sturm did not infringe Keurig’s patents, because Keurig’s patent rights were exhausted. Patent exhaustion is an affirmative defense to a claim of patent infringement, which is triggered, in some instances as in this case, when a patent owner authorizes...
14 Oct 2013
In a case that should serve as a warning to anyone looking to overcome Office Actions by making misleading or false statements to the PTO, an infringement action was dismissed after a patent was found unenforceable due to inequitable conduct during its prosecution. A patent involving wireless transmission of caller identification information, owned by Intellect...
15 Aug 2013
Victoria Espinel, intellectual property chief at the White House, has stepped down from her official position as of August 9, 2013. Espinel was the first person to ever serve as the official intellectual property enforcement officer at the White House, a position that was established through Congressional legislation in 2008 but was not filled until...
9 Aug 2013
A confederation of tech executives have banded together in an attempt to lobby Congressional lawmakers in the US House of Representatives for laxer intellectual property laws. This is an odd occurrence, one would think that tech CEOs like these would want more stringent IP laws in order to protect their assets, but these executives maintain...
9 Aug 2013
For a couple of years now, General Electric has been looking to make serious investments in solar energy research and development. In 2011 PrimeStar Solar and announced that they would use that company’s resources to begin manufacture of solar panels in Colorado. However, the enterprise came to an unexpected end yesterday when solar power rival,...
5 Aug 2013
There are many well founded fears about progress and how intellectual property may come to reshape our society. The New Statesman however, has hit on the most solid and grounded fear of them all: that robots are coming to steal your job. And not just blue collar jobs either, Alex Hern’s article opines that white...
3 Aug 2013
Wired, one of the preeminent technologically oriented online news sources, has a fascinating article arguing that we need a crowdfunding platform for patents. Writer Samuel Arbesman opens by citing two impressive statistics. One is that every year the citizens of the US spend $40 billion to support technological innovation and research (about two-thirds of this...
22 Jul 2013
The New York Times blog has an article by Joseph E. Stiglitz, revisiting the Supreme Court’s decision on gene patents. As he writes in specific relation to the gene patent case, “the case was a battle between those who would privatize good health, making it a privilege to be enjoyed in proportion to wealth, and...
22 Jul 2013
Las Vegas was one of the major American cities to be hit hardest by the global recession of 2008. People aren’t in a hurry to gamble away what little money they have in a depression, and this substantially affected Las Vegas tourism for the past couple of years. However, it seems that the famous city...
22 Jul 2013
One of the most remarkable developments of the past few years has been 3D printing, a system that can literally print a solid object using only a design and some plastic polymers. The applications for such a device are seemingly endless. It can print cheap food for impoverished third world nations and solve world hunger!...
10 Jul 2013
Counterfeiting conjures a rather specific image whenever it is brought up in conversation. Most would imagine some thugs hiding out in a dark basement where a heavy machine consistently prints out reams and reams of fake money. While this is the most notable example of counterfeiting, it is hardly the only example; intellectual property has...