Posts Tagged: "Harvard University"

Earle Dickson Invents Band-Aid® Bandages to Promote Healing

December 28 marks the anniversary of the issuance of a patent covering a bandage technology commonly known as the Band-Aid®, invented at Johnson & Johnson… In order to speed up the process of tending to his wife’s cuts and nicks, Dickson came to the idea of preparing a length of adhesive tape with sections of gauze, allowing Josephine to snip off a strip of tape and quickly apply the adhesive bandage. When the couple considered how useful such a product might be in households across the country, Earle brought the idea to his boss James Wood Johnson, another one of the three co-founding brothers of J&J. Band-Aid® brand adhesive bandages first hit the consumer market in 1920.

Is Brookings Pushing an Efficient Infringer Narrative with Biased Panel Discussion?

Unfortunately, there’s every indication that today’s event at Brookings will feature more of the same kind of misguided rhetoric on perceived issues with the patent system which don’t truly exist. The evidence for this starts with the moderator for the day’s final roundtable discussion, titled Realigning Incentives to Increase Patent Quality. The moderator for this discussion will be Tim Lee, senior reporter of tech policy for Ars Technica. Lee has written in the past on the effects of “ridiculous patent litigation” and has given space to viewpoints which want to limit patentability in certain sectors, such as in business methods. Lee has also been very critical of appellate court decisions in patent cases in recent years to the point that assertions he’s made on case law regarding the patentability of software inventions border on the ridiculously absurd. This individual, who has a clearly anti-patent viewpoint, will be controlling the discussion during the final panel roundtable on patent policy.

Federal Circuit Finds TC Heartland Changed Controlling Law, Can Be Applied Retroactively

Arguing against Micron’s motion to dismiss, Harvard contended that TC Heartland only affirmed a previous precedent set by SCOTUS and that the improper venue challenge was available to Micron back when it filed its first motion in August 2016… The Federal Circuit concluded that the TC Heartland decision “changed controlling law in the relevant sense” and thus the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the patent venue statute was not available to Micron at the time of its August 2016 motion to dismiss.concluded that the TC Heartland decision “changed controlling law in the relevant sense” and thus the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the patent venue statute was not available to Micron at the time of its August 2016 motion to dismiss.

Swiss researchers make breakthrough in medical microrobot technology

ETHZ, one of the Swiss universities involved in the recent microbot breakthrough, received a patent in 2013 for a related technology. U.S. Patent No. 8405256, entitled Wireless Resonant Magnetic Actuation for Untethered Microrobots, claims a wireless resonant micro-actuator having at least two magnetic bodies connected to each other with a resilient member to form a spring-mass system, a magnetic field generator which creates a magnetic force to wirelessly power the spring-mass system and a converter which converts oscillatory motion of the two magnetic bodies into useful motion for the untethered microrobot. This innovation addresses issues in propulsion systems for microrobots which are incapable of creating effective propulsion for an untethered microrobot.