Posts in Technology & Innovation

On the very same day that the U.S. jobs report shows unexpectedly weak growth, the Federal Court of Australia issued a ruling directly opposite to the ruling rendered by the United States Supreme Court relative to gene patents. In Yvonne D’Arcy v. Myriad Genetics, Inc., the Federal Court of Australia ruled that Myriad’s claims to isolated DNA are patentable under the laws of Australia. That is the correct ruling, and it is the ruling the U.S. Supreme Court should have reached in Association of Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics. As the patent eligibility laws of the U.S. become increasingly inhospitable to high-tech innovative businesses we can expect more job losses and worse news for the U.S. economy on the horizon.

LEMLEY: “I think Alice is a real sea change on the patentable subject matter issue. I’ve heard a lot of folks talk about how Alice doesn’t really use the word “software” so it doesn’t really change anything, but I honestly think that’s wishful thinking… I think a lot of patent lawyers had talked ourselves into thinking that the Court didn’t really mean it in Mayo when it talked about having to add a significant inventive component beyond the abstract idea or the natural process. But the court in Alice makes it clear that if your patent covers an implementation of an idea we want proof of an inventive concept beyond that idea before we’ll grant you a patent.

In this follow-up piece, we focus on recently patented technologies that deal with all aspects of hydrogen generation and the use of hydrogen fuels. We begin our discussion with a trio of patents related to various processes of hydrogen generation. Storing and transportation of hydrogen has been cited as an issue for more implementation of hydrogen technologies, which is why we were happy to include a couple of patents aimed at solving these problems. Methods for refilling hydrogen fuel cells and a couple of technologies for recovering greenhouse gases created by hydrogen generation processes are also discussed below.

The foundation of Panasonic’s electronics development has allowed the corporation and its subsidiaries to explore a great many applications for their electronics, some of them designed to address some serious health issues. One patent we discuss involves a system of measuring the cognitive ability of a person to determine whether a mental conditions requires that they seek help for scheduling simple and routine events. Other electronics systems protected by Panasonic involve better methods of renting packs of digital content to devices as well as more effective pupil detection in grayscale images for red-eye correction.

She thought about a new approach to get these patents off the shelf: launching an international competition for teams to develop business plans for a start-up company around some of the most promising inventions… Eleven new companies have already been formed, five have completed their licensing negotiations with NIH, most of the new companies have secured venture funding, several have letters of intent from large drug companies and one team landed an additional $700K after winning a separate business plan competition.

Capitol Hill is frequently the setting for both grandstanding and pandering, and given the prevailing political and public sentiment it is also frequently a place where businesses find an inhospitable welcome. A recent case in point: Three senior members of Congress (Henry Waxman, Frank Pallone Jr., and Diana DeGette) have started a joint investigation into the pricing of Sovaldi, a breakthrough drug for hepatitis C produced by Gilead Sciences. Rather than applaud the health benefits that this drug will deliver, Congress is grilling the company on their pricing decision, striking fear in the investment community, and indirectly undermining the healthcare innovation that is so desperately needed.

Without any legitimate statutory precedent or authority the Supreme Court is wrecking the U.S. economy just as sure as snow is white and water is wet. Unfortunately, a terribly divided Federal Circuit is causing their own brand of destruction. We are entering a dark time for patents; one that will have a significant deleterious effect on the U.S. economy…. While the Supreme Court is assaulting patent rights vis-a-vis patent eligibility, the United States Court of Appeals is assaulting patent rights from a different angle — obviousness. The Federal Circuit has long been infatuated with de novo review, which means that they get to do whatever they want and give absolutely no deference to the district court and/or jury, but lately the Federal Circuit has ratcheted it up a notch.

“[F]or a living I reverse engineer code and testify in court. Yet I could not reverse engineer this code. Every time I touched it to make some kind of change to test it, the whole thing broke. And I finally had to write the code completely from scratch because this open source code was such a kludge, such a mess, that it was impossible for me to figure out… [T]here’s a bunch of issues here and maybe some of them are that programmers nowadays aren’t well trained and they’re not well disciplined in programming techniques… [they] write code as quickly as you can, throw it out there, people will debug it for you. So first of all maybe we need to be teaching more discipline to programmers. We need to… convince them, hey, now that you’ve really gone through a rigorous program it’s not just okay to throw stuff together but create something with a structure that’s debuggable, that’s understandable, and that is innovative and patentable.”

Before widespread application of hydrogen in electrical utilities can be addressed, however, a number of shortcomings have yet to be solved. Although hydrogen can be derived from a number of sources, most of the world’s current hydrogen manufacture requires natural gas, according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Natural gas is still a fossil fuel and releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere when combusted for these processes. Storing and transportation of hydrogen is also very important as hydrogen, compared to other fuels, has a low energy for its volume even though it has a high energy for its weight. The ability to store and transport hydrogen in cost-effective ways is currently a stumbling block on the path towards greater use of this alternative energy carrier in electrical systems.

Today we’ll be focusing strictly on patent applications published recently by the USPTO. We’ve explored many areas of Panasonic’s recent R&D operations, and it’s no surprise that many of these innovations relate to the corporation’s long line of electronic products. Although there is some speculation that Panasonic will leave smartphone markets in the coming years, we’ve included a couple of patent applications related to touchscreen displays or internal component configurations for electronic devices. Other electronics inventions which Panasonic is seeking to protect involve fields as diverse as healthcare and lighting. This company has recently created some systems for digital media consumption, including a method for providing video subtitles which are optimized for 3D videos. Driver safety systems for drawing attention towards road obstacles, as well as business systems for rapidly identifying customer service issues within an establishment, are also discussed.

Recently I had the opportunity to interview Bob Zeidman, the president and founder of Zeidman Consulting, who is also the president and founder of Software Analysis and Forensic Engineering Corporation, Zeidman is an software expert. In fact, in addition to consulting with lawyers and technology companies, he is an testifying and consulting expert witness. The premise of our conversation was the upheaval in the patent industry thanks to the Supreme Court’s decision in Alice v. CLS Bank. In part 1 of our conversation we discussed the decision and ways that attorneys can build a specification to satisfy the Alice standard. In part 2 of our 3 part discussion, which appears below, we wrap up our discussion of the Alice decision and dive into a discussion about the fact that many in the computer science world don’t believe what they do to be particularly innovative or even special.

Modern software tools allow people to turn fairly abstract ideas into reality. That’s the beauty of software. You can start describing things in such a high level and yet output what I consider an innovative invention. And so how do we separate abstract ideas that are unpatentable from an actual software implementation is going to be really difficult. And I don’t think this ruling helps…. One of the reasons there’s an explosion in software patents is that it’s really easy to create a software patent without having written the code. And I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. But I do know, I have seen patents where there have been code snippets that don’t work. And I think that’s one thing to be careful of.

Hewlett-Packard has one of the stronger patent portfolios among U.S. technology developers, and the past few weeks have seen many interesting additions to that portfolio. One patent protects a method of brokering fair prices between printing entities and document acquisition services, which often provide printing services to mobile device users. Another protects a scanning technology which can determine if a product posing under a brand name is a counterfeit. A redesigned laptop for easier accessibility of internal components, as well as a method of identifying clothing in images, are also discussed below.

Inkjet printing technologies are the focus of a couple of recently published patent applications which are assigned to Epson, including a few technologies developed to prevent heat damage from interfering with printer functionality. Other printing innovations created by Epson include a new ink set for black inks that reduces yellow discolorations in printed images. We also discuss some inventions in head-mounted displays and robotics, including one invention involving a redesigned suction-type robot which is more capable of holding a load when an external force acts on the load. Printers are again in major focus during our exploration of the patents recently issued to Epson by the USPTO. A reduction in electrical contact errors in ink cartridges is supported by one invention we discuss, as well as another technology for improved processing of printer errors that require the printer motor to be powered off, such as paper jams. We include another couple of patents which represent Epson’s further developments in the robotics and head-mounted display technologies mentioned above. We also explore one patent protecting an event scheduling method for organizations that enables easier registration and sharing of events among multiple people.