Posts Tagged: "Guest Contributor"

Patent vs. Trade Secret Strategy: A Four Factor Decision Framework

Patents and trade secrets are both valuable assets that companies can utilize to protect their innovations and establish competitive advantages in the market. Strategic IP portfolio development and management leverages both patents and trade secrets where they are most effective with the goal of maximizing protection while minimizing costs.

Patent Filings Roundup: Qualcomm Dragged into Waco by Magentar on IoT Chips; Board Skips Merits in Denial

Happy belated Valentine’s Day; there were 74 district court terminations last week (mostly file-and-settle flotsam); 36 Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) filings (bolsted by Qualcomm indemnification filings and some medical device action); and 56 district court patent filings this week, in a mid-month lull before certain entities have to hit their end-of-month quota; let’s get to it.

Biden Administration Should Recommend Clarifying Patent Eligibility Law in American Axle

Nine months in, and we are still awaiting the Biden administration’s decision as to whether the law of patent eligibility should be clarified. This area of patent law has in recent years become increasingly unpredictable, and the consequences of that unpredictability have largely fallen on startups, whose primary assets are often inventions. On May 3, 2021, the Supreme Court invited the Solicitor General to recommend whether certiorari should be granted in American Axle v. Neapco Holdings, LLC—a case in which a method for manufacturing vehicle driveshafts was deemed ineligible under 35 USC § 101 as being directed to a law of nature.

Clause 8 Podcast: Professor Dan Brown and Dan Jr.’s Patent Battle Against a Retail Giant

Prof. Dan Brown and his son, Dan Brown Jr., are straight out of central casting.  Prof. Brown, the father, grew up in a working-class Irish family on Chicago’s South Side before eventually becoming a professor of engineering at Northwestern University. Dan Jr. is a moppy-haired marketing genius who is now President of LoggerHead Tools.

Thank You, Senator Tillis, for Recognizing the Need for Evidence-Based Policymaking in Patent Law

Earlier this month, Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) sent a letter to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), expressing concern about policymaking on drug patents and drug prices being driven by a narrative rooted more in policy goals than in actual data. He sent another letter to a policy organization, Initiative for Medicines, Access, and Knowledge (I-MAK), which has held itself out as go-to source for data on the number of patents covering drugs. I-MAK has become very popular; its drug patent numbers are invoked as fact by congresspersons, academics, congressional witnesses, and policy activists. Senator Tillis is to be commended for expressing serious concerns about the unreliability of drug patent numbers repeatedly invoked in the policy debates over drug prices in Washington, D.C. His letter to the USPTO and FDA requests that the agencies engage in an “independent assessment and analysis of the sources and data that are being relied upon by those advocating for patent-based solutions to drug pricing.”