Posts Tagged: "patent"

Last month, the Intellectual Property Owners Association (IPO) issued its 38th annual listing of the Top 300 organizations that have been granted U.S. patents. The 2020 list reflects many of the findings released by IFI Claims in that company’s Top 50 U.S. patent grant recipient list for 2020, although discrepancies between the two underscore the oft-difficult nature of parsing patent data into statistically relevant categories. IPO’s Top 300 listing ranks International Business Machines (IBM) as the top recipient of U.S. patents last year. During 2020, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) issued 9,435 patents to IBM, a decrease of only 12 patents from the total issued to IBM by the USPTO in 2019. Close on IBM’s heels is Samsung Electronics, which received 8,539 U.S. patents in 2020, a 1% decline from the 8,735 U.S. patents issued to Samsung in 2019. In third place is LG Corporation, which received 5,112 U.S. patents during 2020, a 4% decline from the series of LG companies that the IPO consolidated for this year’s listing.

Traditional Chinese Medicine, or TCM, is a subset of herbal medicine. TCM patent applications generally fall into four categories. A Compound formula is the predominant type of patent application in the field of Chinese medicine. This is not surprising because most TCM combines two or more medicinal materials to be effective. Medicinal craft refers to active ingredients extracted from medicinal materials using a specialized process, or the specialized process itself. Medicinal materials refer to the original medicinal materials used in the preparation of Chinese medicines. Some of these original medicinal materials are the whole plant or a certain part of the plant, and some need to be processed. Related products refer to non-medicinal products containing Chinese medicines, including medicated foods, namely functional foods, health products and cosmetics containing Chinese medicines. These categories reflect the main objectives of TCM patent protection: namely, to protect the formula, craft, original materials, and commercial products. 

The new Presidential Administration has hardly settled in before being confronted with a stark choice: will they continue policies that foster public/private sector R&D partnerships or be diverted down a path that’s been a dead-end? President Biden faces two herculean tasks: getting the COVID-19 pandemic under control while reviving the economy. The problems are intertwined and require continuous innovation to overcome, which means tapping the best minds in our public and private sectors. We’ve just witnessed a modern miracle, as such partnerships seamlessly came together to create effective COVID-19 vaccines and therapies in record time. But the policies these collaborations depend on are now being questioned.

Korean company Daewoong and its U.S. counterpart Evolus recently found themselves in a dispute with U.S.-Irish company Allergan and its counterpart Medytox over misappropriation of both a bacterial strain and the manufacturing process to make cosmetic injection products from that strain. Daewoong recently received Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval to market an injection in the United States that competes with Botox, owned by Allergan-Medytox. In order to prevent this entrance into the market, Allergan-Medytox filed a complaint with the International Trade Commission (ITC) to block imports of the new product under Section 337. The only relationship between Allergan and Medytox is an anticompetitive market allocation agreement. Daewoong’s new product posed a threat to the profitability of Allergan’s agreement with Medytox and therefore became the subject of a dispute before the ITC. Importantly, the manufacture of the products occurs in Korea and the injectables are then imported into the United States.

Accurate and clear patent drawings strengthen and enhance patent applications, helping patent examiners who are already overburdened with applications to understand inventions faster. In this article, we will be covering the essential points on the importance of patent drawings and how we can make the drawings feasible for filing at the USPTO. We will also cover some important guidelines to help you to avoid unwanted office actions.

District court patent filings exploded this week with 126, while Patent Trial and Appeal Board filings were down substantially, with just 11 inter partes reviews (IPRs) and two post grant reviews (PGRs) filed. The district courts saw the return of serial filer WSOU (this time against F5 Networks) as well as a new round of suits in AGIS Software Development LLC (discussed below), a surprising (even for them) number of new IP Edge suits, and a fair number of new defendants added to existing non-practicing entity (NPE) suits. Raymond Anthony Joao continues to add defendants quickly to various subsidiaries, and Leigh Rothschild had a few new cases, in a week dominated by NPE filings.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) on February 1 held in part that the United States Patent and Trademark Office’s (UPSTO) Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) erred in finding a claim anticipated when the petition for inter partes review had only asserted obviousness as to the claim. M&K Holdings, Inc. v. Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. (CAFC, Feb 1, 2020). The CAFC vacated the PTAB’s decision on that claim but affirmed the holding of unpatentability as to the rest of the asserted claims.

For better or for worse, there is no such thing as a worldwide patent. There is, however, something that approximates a worldwide patent application that can ultimately result in a patent being obtained in over 150 countries around the world. This patent application is known as an international patent application, or simply an international application. The international treaty that authorizes the filing of this single international patent application is the Patent Cooperation Treaty, most commonly referred to as the PCT.

The United States has a clear need for patent reform, but does our legislature understand how to implement that reform? For decades, a shortcoming to our approach to patent reform has been misidentifying the problem as “patent trolls” (more generally, bad actors). Based on a misidentified problem, we have implemented a decades-long policy to systematically weaken patent rights, in an attempt to deter this archetypal bad actor. If we instead use economic principles to address patent reform, we would understand the root problem to our patent system—exorbitantly bloated transactional costs.

The United States is not even two weeks into the administration of President Joe Biden and it’s likely that the administration’s selection for Director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) will not become clear for a few months yet. Many members of the U.S. innovation community, however, are well aware of the high stakes in play with that selection. The tenure of outgoing Director Andrei Iancu was lauded across many sectors of the U.S. patent system, perhaps with the exception of the tech sector. As we consider candidates for the next USPTO head, perhaps we should look to the political moment in which we find ourselves to guide our search.  

The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) last week ruled against Qualcomm in an antitrust case over UMTS-compliant baseband chipsets. The case dates back to April 2010, when UK company Icera Inc. filed a complaint accusing Qualcomm of predatory pricing by supplying three chipsets to its customers Huawei and ZTE at below cost price…. The judgment gives the Commission the green light to seek a broad range of information in antitrust investigations, which may have implications for actions against other tech companies.

Martha Jones of Amelia County, Virginia, is believed by many to be the first black woman to receive a United States patent. Her application for an “Improvement to the Corn Husker, Sheller” was granted U.S. patent No. 77,494 in 1868. Jones claimed her invention could husk, shell, cut up, and separate husks from corn in one operation, representing a significant step forward in the automation of agricultural processes.

Courts around the world have determined appropriate methodologies for calculating damages on standard essential patents (SEPs) for which patent holders have made an assurance to license on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND) terms. Determinations of patent holdup, licensee holdout, use of worldwide portfolio licensing, incremental value rule, etc. are included in these decisions. The court determines damages based on the below-referenced judgments and FRAND terms when reviewing SEP infringements. Under most patent laws, infringement damages are set based on factors including actual loss due to infringement, if the actual loss is difficult to determine, gains of the infringer, and if both actual loss and gains are not available—determination of appropriate multiples of a reasonable royalty fee. 

Companies that have a strong, diversified patent portfolio can establish themselves as key innovators within a particular field and secure a freedom to operate in that field. In some situations, companies may also choose to enforce patent rights granted to them by these patents in a litigation, either offensively against an alleged infringer or as a defense to patent infringement claims against them.