Posts Tagged: "ip"

IP rights are often viewed as barriers, not assets. No wonder respect for IP is at an all-time low, and pilfering of IP rights is widely acceptable. Our culture seems to be saying: “It’s ok to shoplift intangibles, if it’s not too obvious.” But buying fake goods, copying content, or appropriating someone’s trade secrets are not victimless crimes. They have a dramatic economic impact.

FisherBroyles, LLP is pleased to announce that James J. Pohl has joined its Washington, D.C. office as a partner in its Intellectual Property Law Group. Pohl is an experienced patent attorney with a true passion for providing thoughtful and judiciously creative advice to help clients succeed.

Jacqueline Charlesworth has joined Covington’s Intellectual Property Rights and Media and Communications practices in the New York office. She most recently served as General Counsel and Associate Register of Copyrights of the U.S. Copyright Office.

Goldberg Kohn is pleased to announce the continued growth of its Intellectual Property Practice Group with the addition of Marsha Hoover as principal and group chair. A seasoned attorney with more than 30 years of experience, Hoover joins Goldberg Kohn from Chicago IP boutique Marshall Gerstein & Borun, where she was a partner in its Trademarks and Copyrights practices.

The Senate Judiciary Committee is where any action relating to intellectual property reform will be played out during the 115th Congress, at least on the Senate side of the Capitol. Unlike in previous years, we enter 2017 without much support for a fresh round of patent reform, but at least some patent reform measures are sure to be introduced during the 115th Congress… Look for efforts to grant the Copyright Office greater autonomy and independence during the 115th Congress, even a push to remove the Copyright Office out form under the Library of Congress… Without further ado, meet the Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Over the past few years we have seen a surge in cyber attacks against well-known organizations, each seemingly larger than the last. As cybercriminals look for innovative ways to penetrate corporate infrastructures, the challenges for brand owners to protect their IP has steadily grown… Most organizations have implemented stringent security protocols to safeguard their IT infrastructure, but conventional security measures don’t provide the critical intelligence needed to analyze cyberattacks that propagate in the Deep Web and Dark Web. It is fundamentally harder to navigate a medium where web pages are unindexed and anonymity can hide criminal activity.

The popular story goes that Alexander Graham Bell and the second man to file USPTO paperwork related to invention of the telephone, Elisha Gray, did so on the same day, Feb. 14, 1876, when time of day of receipt was not recorded. The exact order in which their paperwork was received that day by the chief patent examiner and how remains in dispute even now, according to the prologue of The Telephone Patent Conspiracy of 1876. Over time, historians seem to have sided with Bell, and Gray has more or less faded into a footnote of history.

In July, Kilpatrick Townsend and Ponemon Institute released their findings from The Cybersecurity Risk to Knowledge Assets study, which confirmed most companies’ worst fears — their intellectual property is at risk every day, and theft is rampant. The 600 survey respondents also disclosed that most companies are unsophisticated when it comes to identifying their key intellectual property (particularly trade secrets) and protecting that adequately. And, most surprisingly, the expected costs associated with loss of these important assets was estimated by nearly seven out of ten respondents to total more than $100 million.

My fellow Australian patent attorney Andy Mukherji recently asked the question on this site: Are Australia’s listed IP firms doomed to fail? Doubtless the hyperbole was intentional, but Andy raises a fair point. The Australian IP professions – registered patent and trade marks attorneys (who, for the most part, would be recognized as patent agents rather than attorneys in the US) and IP lawyers – are currently engaged in what might well be regarded as a brave and daring experiment. Prior to 15 April 2013 the regulatory regime in Australia did not even permit patent attorneys to incorporate. Now, less than four years later, not only have many firms chosen to take up the option of incorporation, but Australia now has (to the best of my knowledge) the largest number of publicly-listed IP firms per capita in the world!

Softbank’s acquisition of ARM Holdings is widely known and several blogs and articles have tried to explain the business background of the huge deal. Just following the BREXIT vote, one of the best-known (worldwide) United Kingdom-based high tech companies is leaving the for seemingly greener pastures. Despite the new owners’ assurances to leave the headquarters in the United Kingdom and promises to double the number of employees in five years, speculation persists. And, though much has been reported about the business deal, little has been said about how the acquisition changed Softbank’s IP portfolio.

The UN Panel unfortunately squandered its 9-month gestation period. It stuffed into one repository every long-discarded remnant of anti-patent and pro-price-control schemes buried in IP’s historic landfill. Its Report expressly recommended directives to carry out each of them, demonstrating their counterproductive unworkability. After cramming each policy device into a trashcan of unworkable IP stratagems, they waited until the last minute and dumped it on the doorstep of the UN General Assembly. As University of Chicago Economist Tomas Philips concisely explains in this weekend’s WSJ, the UNHLP’s recommendations are nonsensical.

Disruptive innovation, like what we are seeing in the health care industry, often causes disruption elsewhere, and the legal landscape is no exception. The life cycle of digital health products and services — from conception to promotion — presents a unique set of legal challenges, and there is no one-size-fits-all approach to the matrix of issues facing these products. As a lawyer, these are the kind of projects that remind us of law school exams — lots of issues and, often, no clearly defined answers or solutions… This article explores some of those tools and why one might choose to pursue one or, in the more probable case, some combination of them.

The IP Licensing Guidelines, which state the agencies’ antitrust enforcement policy with respect to the licensing of intellectual property protected by patent, copyright, and trade secret law and of know-how, were issued in 1995 and are now being updated. In the agencies’ view, the IP Licensing Guidelines remain soundly grounded, as a matter of antitrust law and economics. Nevertheless, the agencies have determined that some revisions are in order because the IP Licensing Guidelines should accurately reflect intervening changes in statutory and case law.

A developer asserting trade dress protection must, therefore, establish that a game’s design does not yield a utilitarian advantage by demonstrating that “the product feature serves no purpose other than identification of the game developer.” A developer must also identify alternative designs that offer the same functional features as the asserted trade dress. Alternative designs available to competitors ensure that a developer is not monopolizing a useful or aesthetically pleasing game feature.

During 2016’s second quarter, plaintiffs filed a total of 1,282 patent infringement cases in U.S. district court. This is a 33 percent increase in the 958 patent cases filed during the first quarter but data suggests that the second quarter tends to see the highest level of infringement cases over all other quarters according to Lex Machina data scientists Brian Howard. “We would expect a jump up from the first quarter,” he said. The first quarter was also a trough for patent infringement cases after last November’s massive number of 847 patent cases, just more than 100 cases less than the entire docket for this year’s first quarter. “The rise we’ve seen puts this year on track with 2011 or 2012 rather than the last two years,” Howard said.