Posts Tagged: "Eric Guttag"

The meaning of words often depends on the context in which they appear.  That principle is also true of terms which appear in patent claims.  In Ultimax Cement Manufacturing Corp. v. CTS Cement Manufacturing Corp., the Federal Circuit reaffirmed that the context matters in reversing a district court grant of summary judgment that certain patent claims were not infringed or…

After Monday’s oral argument, many are trying to divine how the U.S. Supreme Court will rule in the Bilski v. Kappos, and whether the Federal Circuit’s “machine or transformation” test will survive. Having now read the oral argument transcript, my own prognostication is that the Federal Circuit’s “machine or transformation” test will be trounced as too inflexible, although the Supreme…

Federal funding, typically in the form of research grants, is often used to support university research.  The Bayh-Dole Act also allows universities to retain title to invention rights in such research (referred to as “subject inventions”).  See 35 U.S.C. § 202(c)(2).  What the Federal Circuit has struggled with recently is what does “retain title” mean under Bayh-Dole, and especially where…

Determining what compounds are obvious under the doctrine of “structural similarity” can be a daunting challenge, even for those of us with a chemistry or pharmaceutical background.  Add the doctrine of “inequitable conduct” to the “structural similarity” brew, and the plot truly thickens.  But there’s enough schizophrenia about the structural differences between one prior art compound called Schmutz X and…

Legend has it that Zeus punished Prometheus by binding him to a rock while having his regenerating liver eaten daily by a great eagle. After the case of Prometheus Laboratories, Inc. v. Mayo Collaborative Services, we in the patent world may now be subjected to similar torture in determining when medical/drug dosage calibration methods qualify as statutory subject matter under…

The appeal in Lucent Technologies, Inc. v. Gateway, Inc. from the Southern District of California was considered in many quarters as the potentially seminal case on how to calculate damages based on a reasonable royalty using the Georgia-Pacific factors, especially the “entire market value” rule (aka factor 13). That Microsoft and others were currently on the hook to Lucent Technologies…

In the 1972 case of Deepsouth Packing Co. v. Laitram Corp, a bare majority of the Supreme Court ruled that exporting three separate boxes of parts that could be assembled abroad into a patented deveining machine in less than an hour was not actionable under 35 U.S.C. § 271(a). In response, Congress in 1984 enacted 35 U.S.C. § 271(f) to…

The Federal Circuit has recently issued some highly controversial decisions, such as In re Bilski now before the U.S. Supreme Court. But possibly the strangest this year is Martek Biosciences Corp. v. Nutrinova, Inc. What makes Martek Biosciences strange is not so much the argument between the majority and dissent about whether the claim term “animal” included humans. Instead, it…