Posts Tagged: "ecommerce"

First, this type of circular “logic” is at the heart of virtually all Alice rejections. Here the examiner concludes there is nothing significantly more than the judicial exception (which in this case is an abstract idea) because the additional elements add no more than the abstract idea. In other words, the examiner says there is nothing significantly more than the abstract idea because there is nothing more than the abstract idea. The Alice equivalent of this “how dare you ask me, I’m your mother” simply says what you’ve claimed is abstract because it is abstract, period. Clearly, a conclusory rejection like this without any real explanation does not satisfy the examiner’s prima facie burden to articulate a valid reason to reject. After all “because” is not a reason.

In every art unit examiners confirm that there is an examiner within the Art Unit who is the Alice expert and that examiners have said that even if they are ready to allow a case, nothing can be allowed without the approval of that Alice expert. This sounds quite similar to second pair of eyes review, which wreaked enormous havoc on the patent system over a decade ago. Second pair of eyes review was one of the primary reasons why patent pendency got out of control and the backlog of patent applications grew to well over 1 million unexamined patent applications. It seems to have returned under the guise of Alice.

Delay, frustrate, harass and ignore patent applicants. Issue frivolous rejections if necessary, but reject at all costs. If the Board issues a complete reversal just reopen prosecution. Eventually the patent applicant will get the idea and abandon the application. TC 3600 seems to be fighting a very successful and coordinated war of attrition against applicants.

So an applicant waits years on appeal to get relief from frivolous rejections, achieves a complete and total victory, and their reward is another bogus rejection from the same examiner who has been harassing them for years. It is no wonder many applicants just give up. If this were happening anywhere else in the world we would ridicule the system as fixed or rigged… How ironic, and sad, is it that the PTAB has the authority to invalidate issued patents in post grant proceedings but has no implementing authority with respect to its decisions completely reversing even frivolous examiner rejections. This is yet another reason the PTAB is appropriately characterized a death squad. The only power the PTAB seems to have is to take rights away from property owners (i.e., patent owners).

What is happening in TC 3600 is prosecution is being re-opened for the purpose of issuing Alice rejections. With the help of readers, so far I’ve found eleven (11) separate cases over the last 10 months where prosecution was re-opened by Greg Vidovich, Director of TC 3600, after the Board issued a decision completely reversing the examiner on every rejection of every claim. In each case the Vidovich authorized re-opening of prosecution simply to issue Alice rejections… What good is an appeal when the TC Director has demonstrated that even if the appeal is successful prosecution can be re-opened and more bogus rejections made? What good is going back into prosecution with the same unreasonable examiner that has just has each and every rejection of each and every claim reversed? There is no relief for applicants, which is not how the system is supposed to work.

Upon closer review things are much, much worse than I previously reported. The problem is also far more widespread. Using LexisNexis Patent Advisor®, I looked at the E-commerce Art Units, this time focusing on what has happened over the past 18 months. Focusing on this segment of post-Alice prosecution the allowance picture is utterly atrocious… Only 12 patents were issued by Art Unit 3689 in 2015, while 365 applications went abandoned, which corresponds to an allowance rate of 3.2%. So far in 2016 there have been only 3 patents issued by Art Unit 3689, while 232 patent applications have gone abandoned, which corresponds to an allowance rate of 1.3%.

This new post-prosecution pilot program feels a lot like rearranging the chairs on the Titanic. Unless and until the Patent Office does something about recalcitrant patent examiners this effort may wind up being much ado about nothing… If you look at Art Unit 3622, which handles applications dealing with incentive programs and coupons, and compare it with Art Unit 3688 and Art Unit 3682, both of which also handle patent applications relating to incentive programs and coupons, you see the same alarming trend. These three Art Units that handle the same type of patent application yet have allowance rates of 9.5%, 29.2% and 63.2%. Something seems seriously wrong and is screaming for investigation.

The Internet retail juggernaut that is Amazon.com continues to get stronger and it’s doing so in a way that should worry other players in the consumer electronics sector. In late June, a Deutsche Bank analyst note was issued pointing out the magnitude of Amazon’s increased dominance of consumer electronics. In 2015 there was an increase of $5.6 billion in the consumer electronics sector and Amazon was responsible for $5.1 billion of that increase. That corresponds to a 90 percent share of the 2015 increase in the consumer electronics sector. Deutsche Bank’s Mike Baker also noted that Amazon now commands a 17 percent share of the consumer electronics market, which puts them in second-place behind only Best Buy

The disparity between the art units is confused even more so when we consider the total number of Alice rejections in each art unit, rather than just counting the total number of applications receiving an Alice rejection. Doing that, we can see that, while 3622 and 3623 have almost equal numbers of applications with Alice rejections, 3623 actually has more in total. This means that applications in that art unit are more likely to receive multiple Alice rejections and take longer to prosecute.

Several questions every patent attorney should be asking before responding to an Alice rejection are: (1) How many Alice rejections has the examiner issued? (2) What does he or she consider to be the sticking points of the decision? (3) How many applications that received an Alice rejection were eventually allowed? Once an attorney has the answers to these questions in hand, the path to success in responding to an Alice rejection is considerably clearer.

Some states have decided that they can’t wait for a federal response on the collection of online sales tax, prompting them to enact their own measures. In Utah, where less than one percent of taxpayers actually pay the use tax they owe the state for Internet retail transactions, some state lawmakers have collaborated on crafting a bill that would give the state more power in collecting sales tax from online retailers, with or without a physical presence within the state. In South Carolina, January 1st of this year brought about the end of a tax break offered to Amazon for building a distribution center in that state. The collection of sales tax from Amazon sales to South Carolina consumers is expected to bring in about $13.8 million in additional tax revenue through 2016, according to projected revenues released by South Carolina’s tax department. The distribution centers built by Amazon serve as the physical in-state nexus which requires it to collect sales tax from South Carolina consumers.

According to Thomson Reuters 2015 list of Top 100 Global Innovators, Amazon and several other established players in mature markets are proving that it’s not just start-ups that have the potential to upend traditional business models and reinvent our world. In fact, several of the companies new to this year’s ranking of top innovators have been around a lot longer than Amazon, among them: Boehringer Ingelheim, Chevron, Exxon Mobil, Johnson Controls, Thales, and Yamaha.

2015 was a truly remarkable year for innovation and we saw major trends in self-driving cars, wearable technologies, digital wallets and much more. I hope you will enjoy this top 10 listing, which includes innovations for providing water in arid regions, wireless charging systems for electronic devices and even the collection and retransmission of sunlight. Of course, as with all of these types of lists, the criteria used for inclusion on this list is subjective, based on my own personal preferences. Please feel free to let us know if you saw something particularly noteworthy in 2015.

As bleak as the picture looked for brick-and-mortar retail, it was much brighter for e-commerce and online retail, which saw their best day ever. According to global analytics firm comScore, 2015’s Cyber Monday saw $2.28 billion in online spending from desktop computer users, the heaviest day of online spending ever recorded and an increase of 12 percent over last year’s Cyber Monday results. When including sales from mobile device consumers, Cyber Monday sales surpassed $3.1 billion.

A digital receipt innovation designed to help Walmart employees conduct better in-store audits after customer checkouts to reduce theft is discussed within U.S. Patent No. 9165276, titled Locating and Organizing Digital Receipt Data for Use in In-Store Audits. It claims a method for reordering digital receipt data for use in an in-store audit involving receiving digital receipt data for a sales transaction conducted at a point-of-sale (POS) system in a store location, generating a digital receipt for the sales transaction including an entry for each purchased item, receiving an indication that the sales transaction will be audited in a store location, referring to audit rules defining an audit priority for each purchased item, reordering the receipt entries of the digital receipt based on the defined audit priority and sending the reordered receipt entries to an auditor mobile device in the store location. This invention intends to improve upon the marginal success in stopping store theft achieved by in-store auditors by presenting auditors with a priority list of which items are most important to audit.