Posts Tagged: "patent applications"

Zuckerberg Announces Facebook Users will Determine Trustworthiness of News

On January 19th, Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg announced that his company would increase its efforts against “fake news” by asking its users to rate the trustworthiness of news sources being posted to the social media platform. Zuckerberg wrote that Facebook will utilize ongoing quality surveys to ask users if they are familiar with a particular news source. Using this data, Facebook will then rate each publication based on the user ratings and prioritize those that are most trusted to surface on news feeds. “There’s too much sensationalism, misinformation and polarization in the world today,” Zuckerberg wrote. “Social media enables people to spread information faster than ever before, and if we don’t specifically tackle these problems, then we end up amplifying them.”

Admissions as Prior Art in a Patent: What they are and why you need to avoid them

So what is an admission? A statement made during patent prosecution identifying the work of another as prior art is called an admission. Admissions can and will be relied upon by patent examiners for both novelty (35 U.S.C. 102) and obviousness (35 U.S.C. 103) determinations, regardless of whether the admitted prior art would otherwise qualify as prior art under the express terms of the statute. Admissions should be avoided at all costs, regardless of how innocent they seem to be. This is a lesson that all new patent practitioners and inventors need to take to heart. No matter how innocuous the statement may seem, always remember that no good deed will go unpunished! Everything you do say can and will be used against your patent once it issues — forever.

A New Breed of Anti-Terrorism Security: Meet the Patented Pups Supporting the NYPD’s Anti-Terrorism

On the ground, the New York Police Department (NYPD) deployed a team of 14 Labrador retrievers trained to detect explosives worn on the bodies of people in the crowd. This team of powerful pups added an extra layer of security to the event, which attracts more than 3.5 million spectators every year. Such a throng raises many crowd-control and terrorism concerns for its host… These super sniffers are trained using the patented “Vapor Wake” method, which enables dogs to smell body-worn bombs and other illicit substances in large crowds from as far away as the length of a football field.

Brazilian PTO Considers Automatically Granting 231,000 Patents to Get Rid of Backlog

The Brazilian Government is considering the adoption of an emergency measure to eliminate the Patent Office chronic backlog problem by automatically granting, without examination, 230,000 pending applications until 2020. The emergency measure has been labelled by the Government as an “extraordinary solution” and a draft of the plan was introduced for public discussion. Companies may soon need to deploy a strategy within a time-frame as short as 90 days to take full advantage of the new system while minimizing potential risks… For the past 15 years, Brazil has been enduring one of the world’s most severe patent backlogs. The problem has grown considerably after the enactment of the 1996 Patent Statute, which was adopted to make the country TRIPS compliant.

Changes in Patent Language to Ensure Eligibility Under Alice

When a rule becomes a target, it ceases to be a good rule.  In the three years since the Supreme Court issued its opinion in Alice, there have been positive changes to patent applications, but there remains a long-term risk that patent practitioners will use tricks to beat the Alice test.  Here, we focus on the changes to patent applications by drafters, as well as changes to patent applications that have issued since Alice… Previous analyses have reported that patent specification length has been increasing since long before 2010. As shown in Figure 3, from 2010 to 2013, the average patent application length was approximately 12,417 words. However, from 2015 and 2017, the average patent application length increased to over 14,700 words… Alice appears to have resulted in positive developments, such as narrowing the scope of claims and increasing disclosure of technical benefits of inventions in the specification.