IPWatchdog

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) announced today that certain intellectual property (IP)-related transactions are now authorized in Russia, following publication by the U.S. Department of Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) of General License No. 31. The authorized transactions include the filing and prosecution of any application to obtain a patent, trademark, or copyright, as well as renewal and maintenance fees.

Funeral services will be held in Salt Lake City, Utah,  on Friday, May 6, for Senator Orrin Hatch, who died on Saturday, April 23, 2022, at the age of 88. Hatch was Utah’s longest-serving senator, first sworn in by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller as a member of the 95th Congress in 1977, and co-author of one of the most significant IP bills ever passed, the 1984 Hatch-Waxman Act.

The DOJ should refrain from taking any steps that would make it more difficult for Americans to innovate amid fierce competition abroad. Further challenges to American innovation will jeopardize national security by disadvantaging and ceding U.S. technological leadership to China and other foreign competitors actively looking to displace the United States as the world leader in critical technologies.

This week in Other Barks & Bites: The Patent Trial and Appeal Board hears oral arguments in the famed CRISPR gene editing case; today marks the deadline for all comments on the 2021  version of the Joint DOJ-USPTO-NIST Policy Statement on Remedies for Standards-Essential Patents Subject to Voluntary FRAND Commitments; Judge Newman dissents from a Federal Circuit majority opinion finding clear error in a district court’s ruling on a patent settlement agreement; in a separate case, the Federal Circuit also dismissed an argument from Myco that injunctive relief against infringement upset the “status quo”; BlackBerry sells its legacy patent assets to a special purpose vehicle formed to purchase those assets for $600 million; and more.