Posts Tagged: "google patents"

Google is another technological innovator whose name comes up often every week at the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office, as they are in the habit of protecting many of their Android system and Internet developments. This week, the USPTO published 9 patent applications assigned to the firm. Some of these improve user interfaces associated with touchscreen displays or head-mounted displays. Google also received 25 patents this week, including one that looks to improve online systems of user review for products.

Paul Ryan is a more common name than you might think. In the world of politics when one speaks of “Paul Ryan” they are talking about the Republican Congressman from Wisconsin who was Mitt Romney’s running-mate and would-have-been Vice President. But in the intellectual property world, particularly the patent litigation world, the name “Paul Ryan” refers to the CEO of Acacia Research Technologies. It is the later Paul Ryan that went on the record with me to discuss Acacia, patent enforcement, how large companies who are infringers disregard innovative independent inventors and more.

The mutually assured destruction approach to patenting can explain in part why large companies continue to patent at the rate they do, but the justification completely misses the point that these large tech giants were not always large. They were, at one time, rather small companies that pursued an aggressive agenda of innovation. A big part of that innovation strategy included obtaining protection for said innovation, largely in the form of acquiring patents. That undeniable truth makes it hard not to question whether the tech giants that lament the failings of the patent system and want to limit or abolish it are simply engaging in good old-fashioned protectionism.

In this patent Google gives us a glimpse at the possible future of Google Books, which can censor books it serves based on the copyright laws of the location from which you access the Internet. In one implementation the method disclosed includes a user requesting a document, the request being received, information being processed and the viewable portions of the document being determined based on the governing copyright laws. The governing copyright laws are determined based on information relating to the user, such as relying on the IP address of the requester, which can disclose the geographic location of the user, at least when it is not spoofed.

Patent and Trademark Depository Librarians read your October 25, 2009 blog entry, USPTO Designates New PTDL, But What About Online, which makes a strong and most welcome call for fully indexed access to all US Patents back to 1790. Many PTDL librarians have called for such access for the past decade. State of the art OCR of USPTO’s image files…

The United States Patent and Trademark Office a few days ago announced the designation of the Ryan-Matura Library of Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Connecticut, as a Patent and Trademark Depository Library (PTDL). The patent and trademark depository library program began in 1871 when federal law first provided for the distribution of printed patents to libraries for use by the…

On Tuesday, September 2, 2009, the mighty 1600 pound gorilla in the room, also known as Google, was granted a design patent on the look of its search webpage found at Google.com.  Yes, the United States Patent and Trademark Office awarded Design Patent No. 599,372 to Google just days ago on an application that was filed on March 6, 2006,…

Three weeks ago, TechRadium, Inc., a Texas Corporation with its principal place of business in Sugar Land, Texas, sued Twitter, Inc., a Delaware corporation with its principal place of business in San Francisco, California, alleging the infringement of US Patent No. 7,130,389, issued on October 31, 2006, and US Patent No. 7,496,183, issued on February 24, 2009, and US Patent…