The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) today announced that it will open the current Patent Law School Clinic Certification Pilot Program to admit 10 additional schools for the upcoming fall 2012 academic year. This pilot program allows law students to practice patent law before the agency under the guidance of a law school faculty clinic supervisor. Submissions from interested law schools will be accepted through Friday, June 1, 2012.

Many readers of IPWatchdog.com know that I hold two degrees from the former FPLC, both my Juris Doctor and my Master of Laws in intellectual property, and continue to have a special place in my heart for the institution and the people affiliated with the institution. It is good to see that the UNH School of Law continues the tradition of Franklin Pierce Law Center. UNH-FPLC has been ranked each and every year since U.S. News began their specialty law school rankings began in 1992.

The Prometheus decision shows that you can never know for sure what the outcome will be once you arrive at the Supreme Court. We also know that the Supreme Court is taking more patent cases now than ever, and those decisions have significant implications for the entire industry above and beyond the patent claims at issue and the parties involved. Your patent portfolio may be at risk because some other company obtained poorly written claims and the Supreme Court has taken the opportunity to decide not only the issues before them but to make decisions based on overarching concerns about the entire patent system.

The U.S. Department of Commerce’s Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) yesterday unveiled a new web-based IP Awareness Assessment Tool designed to help manufacturers, small businesses, entrepreneurs and independent inventors easily assess their knowledge of intellectual property (IP).

The reasoning in Mayo Collaborative Services makes no patent law logical sense on numerous grounds, including disregarding an important paragraph in the Supreme Court’s 1981 case of Diamond v. Diehr that is not only binding precedent, but also tells us that Breyer’s opinion repeatedly does what this paragraph from Diehr says not to do in an analysis of method or process claims under 35 U.S.C. § 101. But the question now becomes what do we do to keep the reasoning in Mayo Collaborative Services from exploding into completely irrational, as well as patent law insane doctrine? The way forward to patent-eligibility rationality, as well as sanity, is through the remand decision in Classen Immunotherapies, Inc. v. Biogen IDEC. Put differently, there may yet be “light” in this currently “dark” patent-eligibility tunnel.

An exhibition showing the intellectual property (IP) behind Steve Jobs’ innovations opens to the public at WIPO on March 30, 2012 and will run through to World Intellectual Property Day on April 26, 2012. The exhibition ties in with this year’s World Intellectual Property Day theme – Visionary Innovators.

Unlike many in the biotech community I do not think the Prometheus decision will break the biotech industry or even seriously affect it. Much like the car mechanic in a small Caribbean island told me when my engine light came on in my rental car, “no worries, no problem!” I believe the holding in Prometheus prevents what could be a future legal quagmire, where overly-broad patents could serve to block entire fields of practice and create an enforcement nightmare in which ghosts of legal uncertainty and licensing ambiguities would haunt hospital hallways, R&D labs, boardrooms, and investment entities throughout the country. If the Prometheus decision would have gone the other way, it would not have been status quo, but rather been fairly harmful to future innovation.

You could attribute what happened here to “selective precedent amnesia.” But frankly such mishandling of binding Supreme Court precedent in Mayo Collaborative Services is a huge problem. (As one commentator has astutely noted, we now have Supreme Court precedent going off in two diametrically opposed directions on essentially the same patent-eligibility issue.) Any persuasiveness (or balance) in the opinion in Mayo Collaborative Services is greatly undermined by failing to directly (and fairly) address Diehr.

You may have heard, but the USPTO is hiring. Not only is the USPTO searching for Administrative Patent Judges, but they are finding some extremely well qualified candidates to add to the ranks of those already serving. With the permission of each of the new APJs, and the cooperation of James Smith, Chief Administrative Patent Judge, it is with pleasure that share the bios the newest APJs, each pictured with Rebecca Blank, Deputy Secretary of Commerce.

From this perspective, (and setting aside considerations of novelty or obviousness) one might conclude that, rather than claiming some methods with reference to anything that looks like a law of nature in a claim, thus raising the specter of §101, it may be better to claim some methods more broadly so as to avoid such issues – maybe obtaining broader claim scope in any event.

Those supporting the reasoning in Breyer’s opinion repeatedly “crow” that Mayo Collaborative Services was a 9-0 decision. But the fact that 9 technologically-challenged Justices reached a unanimous decision based on nonsensical, as well as logically and legally-flawed, reasoning does not impress me, or persuade me. That those 9 Justices simply chose to trounce the Federal Circuit’s decision without leaving any understandable guidance in its place for us mere mortals, chose to deliberately ignore a thoughtful suggestion from the U.S. Solicitor General, and simply determined patent-eligibility under 35 U.S.C. § 101 in a vacuum divorced from any consideration of the relevant context of other patent statutes just makes Breyer’s opinion result-driven and despotic. Such patent law despotism does not earn my respect, only my scorn.

The university panelists then discussed IP portfolio strategy and their recommendations for evaluating international patenting, as well as their tips for keeping costs down. Susanne Hollinger advised TTOs against applying blanket rules to their international patenting decisions, such as “we only file if we have a licensee.” International filing has been an important part of Emory’s strategy, as more than half of their royalty money comes from technologies filed internationally, and they make international filing decisions on a case-by-case basis.

In the last decade, a substantial market has begun to develop for contingent fee representation in patent litigation. Wiley Rein — a traditional general practice law firm with hundreds of attorneys practicing all areas of law — represented a small company, NTP, Inc., in its patent infringement lawsuit against Research in Motion, the manufacturer of the Blackberry line of devices. The lawsuit famously settled in 2006 for $612.5 million, and the press reported Wiley Rein received over $200 million because it handled the lawsuit on a contingent fee basis. And Wiley Rein is not alone in doing so. Many patent litigators around the country have migrated toward handling patent cases on a contingent fee basis.