In addition to key executives from Lifetime Brands, on hand for the day will be Warren Tuttle, Lifetime Brands External Open Innovation Director and President of the United Inventors Association. Steve Greenberg, author of Gadget Nation and host of Food Network’s television program “Invention Hunters” will also be at the event to meet and greet inventors. I personally know both Warren and Steve and they are certainly two of the good guys in the industry. Therefore, I am happy to recommend this event to inventors.

The story of the invention and development of the sewing machine challenges these two assumptions insofar as it is a story of a patent thicket in an extremely old technology, but, more important, it is a story of the successful resolution of this thicket through a private-ordering mechanism. The Sewing Machine War was not brought to an end by new federal laws, lawsuits by public interest organizations, or new regulations at the Patent Office, but rather by the patent owners exercising their rights of use and disposition in their property. In so doing, they created the Sewing Machine Combination, which successfully coordinated their overlapping property claims until its last patent expired in 1877. Moreover, the Sewing Machine War is a salient case study because this mid- nineteenth-century patent thicket also included many related issues that are often intertwined today with concerns about modern patent thickets, such as a non- practicing entity (i.e., a “patent troll”) suing infringers after his demands for royalty payments were rejected, massive litigation between multiple parties and in multiple venues, costly prior art searches, and even a hard-fought priority battle over who was the first inventor of the lockstitch.

Munich/Geneva, 3 May 2012 — With the aim of further developing the international patent system to better support innovation in economies around the globe, the European Patent Office (EPO) and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) have agreed on a comprehensive three-year technical co-operation scheme. The agreement, signed by EPO President Benoît Battistelli and WIPO Director General Francis Gurry in Munich…

The biggest myth about patent appeals is that that the examiner usually wins. The Patent Trial and Appeal Board (“Board”) posts that it reverses examiners only one out of every three decisions —33%. That number is accurate, and reflects the percentage of reversals among Board decisions. But another number is more helpful — 75%. That is the rough percentage of reversals among all appeals—not just Board decisions. The difference arises because not all appeals result in a Board decision. In fact, the vast majority of appeals (80%) never reach the Board. The Board’s 33% number has nothing to say about this invisible sea of patent appeals.

Mr. Kessler believes that Mr. Madison did not understand what he was doing or, at best, did not foresee the expense that patent litigation would involve in the 21st century. In fact, the founding fathers knew exactly what they were doing when writing the intellectual property clause into the U.S. Constitution. They were protecting the individual from the overwhelming power of large entities. They were enacting the very principles of American society for which we fought the Revolutionary War. Since 1790 the U.S. patent system has contributed to America becoming the most innovative society in the history of the world. Fundamentally changing the system in the ways suggested by Mr. Kessler would stifle that innovation.

This is a good time to review the implications of this case, but an even better time to look into the origins and constitutionality of the Non-obviousness requirement. You might object that the jurisprudence of the non-obviousness requirement is so well established that nothing can be learned from this sort of analysis. I disagree. Patent law is under assault by the Supreme Court, the media, the ‘information wants to be free’ crowd, multinational corporations, and the economics profession. If we attempt to explain patent law based on the decisions of people who never passed the patent bar, never wrote a patent, never prosecuted a patent, and do not have a technical background, we are doomed. We need to define patent law as a natural law/right based on certain fundamental truths. This is the only way to get the non-patent attorney judge or the general public to understand patent law and understand that it represents justice.

On Monday, April 30, 2007, the United States Supreme Court issued its final decision in the matter of KSR v. Teleflex, which overruled the Federal Circuit’s application of the so-called “teaching, suggestion, motivation” test (or simply TSM) as it applies to determining whether an invention is obvious. At least for the last generation (and likely longer) no other Supreme Court case in the patent arena has been nearly as influential as the Court’s decision in KSR v. Teleflex. This is because obviousness is where the rubber meets the road for the patentability of inventions. This 5th Anniversary of the ruling provides an opportunity to revisit the decision and where we have come since. This will be a recurring theme this week on IPWatchdog.com as we look at the law of obviousness in the wake of this infamous decision.

There is no such thing as a world-wide patent, although there is something that approximates a world-wide patent application that can result in a patent being obtained in most 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 a single patent application to be treated as a patent application in countries around the world is the Patent Cooperation Treaty, most commonly referred to as the PCT. You can file an International Application pursuant to the rules of the PCT and that application will effectively act as a world-wide patent application, or at least a patent application in all of those countries that have ratified the PCT, which is virtually all of the countries where you would want a patent anyway.

Yes, it was I. The former Borat applying patent examiner turned law student. See Prior Borat: Non-traditional Prior Art Rejections! If nothing other than offering comic relief, the now infamous Borat patent rejection has hopefully illustrated at least one fundamental truth to the inventor and patent practitioner alike – don’t forget to do a thorough search of non-patent literature. I won’t bore you with citations from the MPEP. We all know what the Manual says. Instead I will attempt to provide some general insights into the examination process.

Vanderheyden joins AOP from the legal software and solutions corporation LexisNexis, where he was Vice President and Managing Director, Global IP Solutions. While at LexisNexis, he helped to develop TotalPatent, a leading patent research tool supported by the world’s largest patent database, and PatentOptimizer, a software tool that conducts word-level analysis of the legal integrity of a patent or application. Prior to LexisNexis, Vanderheyden served as Vice President of Marketing and Business Development for IP.com, a global patent and non-patent literature database, where he re-established the corporate brand, launched new products, and developed a patent for a new market opportunity. Vanderheyden held previous positions at IBM and founded Delphion, the first to make US patents searchable on the web.

The Patent Office recently requested comment on the paperwork that applicants submit during post-filing, pre-allowance patent prosecution (Patent Processing (Updating), comment request., 77 Fed. Reg. 16813-17 (Mar. 22, 2012)). This is a highly significant opportunity to seek reform of problematic PTO regulations, one that only comes once every three years. This comment period gives the public access to an oversight officer outside the PTO whose job is to help reduce costs associated with PTO regulations or MPEP guidance that create unnecessary paperwork burden. The PTO has invited the public to challenge long-standing rules, and to seek reform.

The report shows that the mood for 2011 was cautiously optimistic compared to previous years, with fewer organizations experiencing budget reductions and a greater percentage of IP tasks going in-house or being outsourced in order to reduce costs and retain control. This year saw less than half of those surveyed working on a reduced IP budget going into 2012, compared to nearly two-thirds of respondents in last year’s survey. However, the bulk of respondents don’t expect to increase the number of patent families filed in 2012, indicating the persistence of a “do-more-with-less” attitude as the economy slowly recovers.

In all cases, the IEEE, JEDEC, ITU and TIA policies apply to both issued patents and pending applications (regardless of whether such applications are published). Further, all four policies make clear that the SSO will not get involved in the particulars as to what constitutes FRAND licensing practices. Interestingly, and for those paying attention, the IEEE, JEDEC and ITU policies require disclosure of essential patents, whereas the TIA policy simply encourages disclosure of essential patents. Again, there simply is no generally-accepted test to determine whether a particular license offer satisfies the reasonable aspect of an SSO participant’s FRAND commitment. How does this play out in practical terms? A recent case is instructive.

I thought I might take the occasion to identify Green-Tech innovations that relate to recycling technologies, energy conversion and conservation of energy that are worthy of celebration on Earth Day 2012. The following innovations all recently received U.S. patents. What do they have in common? As I was searching for them they caught my eye and I found them to be cool, interesting or exciting. I hope you do too. Whether or not any of these innovations ultimately become adopted in any large scale way is irrelevant if you ask me. The more we search for solutions the more we will find. For innovation to march forward we need creative minds applying their skills. A tip of the hat to all innovators operating in this space is well earned!

Maybe it is the result of the case being of such little importance to the patent system as a whole, or maybe it is just evidence that every blind squirrel finds a nut every once in a while. Whatever the case may be, the United States Supreme Court yesterday did get it right in a patent case. Virtually no one brings appeals from the Patent Office to the district court under § 145 despite the far more favorable review standard, which we have known about at least since 1999 in Dickinson v. Zurko. § 145 will remain an infrequently used relic of the patent system, and we are left to lament that it would have been far better for the Supreme Court to get Mayo v. Prometheus right than for them to get Kappos v. Hyatt right. Sigh.