Posts Tagged: "patent"

The US House passed the Innovation Act (HR3309) in December 2013. The Senate is now well on its way to incorporating this legislation which will make Americans poorer. The bills have many problems that will inhibit small inventors, but the most insidious are “Loser Pays” and “Pay to Play”. It changes the law, singling out inventors as a class so onerous that only they must pay the other side’s legal fees if they don’t win every claim. Pay to Play makes inventors guarantee payment up-front. Some proposed Senate bills (e.g.: S.1013 & S.1612) make sure that almost all Americans and most small companies will never be able to afford to enforce their patents on their inventions.

For small business, patents will become mostly unenforceable due to the proposed much higher upfront cost of litigation, thus making small business patents significantly less valuable. Loss of patent value constricts new company formation, chilling new investments, and choking job formation. Legislating disincentives for capital investments will result in the loss of many hundreds of billions of dollars of wealth in America and dry up the major source of new jobs, small inventing businesses… Patents are the number one indicator of regional wealth according to the Federal Reserve Bank… If these “Patent Reform” bills are signed into law, they will discourage small business patents, and the contrapositive indicates that we will be a poorer nation.

Vonage has been granted three patents on ReachMe Roaming by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. The patents are U.S. Patent No. 8,571,060, U.S. Patent No. 8,600,364 and U.S. Patent No. 8,693,994. These patent share a common ancestry, with the ‘364 patent providing the earliest filing date, which was December 22, 2011. Both the ‘060 patent and the ‘994 patent are continuations in part of U.S. patent application Serial No. 13/492,361, filed Jun. 8, 2012, which is itself a continuation-in-part of U.S. patent application Serial No. 13/334,849, filed Dec. 22, 2011, which matured into the ‘364 patent.

We’ve noticed a great deal of inventions that involve desalination techniques to turn saline water containing a lot of salts into fresh, drinkable water. Desalination is capable of reducing salinity in water from 35,000 ppm, the typical salinity of ocean water, to 1,000 ppm, and many of these innovations are designed to help people apply desalination techniques on a wider scale at lower costs. We’ve also noticed some developments that might help communities derive water from sources other than rivers and streams, such as the atmosphere. As I conducted my research I was struck by how many of these inventions for creating clean water involved other recycling or sustainable technologies, addressing many environmental concerns through one novel system or apparatus.

The above-enumerated problems of the current patent system are real and barriers to further innovation and job creation. But the solutions do not require a comprehensive definition of a troll to fix the patent system. Lady Justice is blindfolded for a purpose. Justice in the US should be meted out objectively regardless of identity. So too in the instant situation. It is not the identity of the actor that needs to be evaluated, but the character of the action. We need to assure that frivolous, predatory actions are penalized and prevent the abusive tactics used by many that harm our innovative culture.

Exciting new innovations being patented and licensed by American universities may provide some effective answers to issues that have been vexing biofuel developers for years. Wilkerson described the breakthrough in Science, explaining that poplars can be specifically designed for deconstruction. “Poplars are dense, easy to store, and the flourish on marginal lands not suitable for food crops, making them a non-competing and sustainable source of biofuel,” said Wilkerson. According to Jennifer Gottwald, a licensing manager with the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF), the basic technology applied here to poplar trees could used in a variety of other plant life, even grasses.

Today is Earth Day 2014, and with that in mind we will be taking some time today and throughout the week to take some time to look at the progress of sustainable, environmentally friendly technologies… We’ve searched the recently published patent applications and issued patents coming out of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to find the most unique innovations in the realm of recycling technologies. We’ve found an assortment regarding novel systems for improving retrieval of recyclable material, as well as new systems of recycling existing waste products… We also found some recently issued patents related to recycling technologies including a couple of original systems for recyclable collection, including one method of shredding mixed waste to remove glass, metal and other recyclables, as well as new methods of recycling disposable materials, such as artificial bait.

Hip surgeries have been taking place for at least three hundreds years, and have progressed from rudimentary surgeries to the sophisticated total hip replacement (i.e., total hip arthroplasty or THA) surgeries that are so commonplace today. Nearly two weeks ago, on Tuesday, April 8, 2014, Gene had a total right hip replacement, which went very well. With this in mind we thought it would be interesting to take a look at the evolution of hip replacement technology through the lens of issued U.S. patents.

We start our profile of Intel’s recently developed technologies with a look at our featured patent application, which discusses a novel system for managing access to a vehicle among multiple drivers. This access management system would also be able to delegate responsibilities, such as gas refueling and scheduled maintenance, as well as enable emergency access to trusted parties. Other patent applications which we noticed today discussed enhanced security measures for private data as well as home media systems for accessing segmented television content. The Intel Corporation is a major recipient of patents issued by the USPTO, and in recent weeks it has secured many interesting additions to its patent portfolio. A couple of patents relate to improved systems of thermal management in mobile electronic devices. Our interest was also piqued by one patent protecting a system of monitoring care patients residing in independent living situations.

The U.S. Department of Commerce’s United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) will host a public forum on May 9, 2014 at the USPTO headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia, to solicit feedback from organizations and individuals on its recent guidance memorandum for determining subject matter eligibility of claims reciting or involving laws of nature, natural phenomena, and natural products (Laws of Nature/Natural Products Guidance). The Laws of Nature/Natural Products Guidance implemented a new procedure to address changes in the law relating to subject matter eligibility in view of recent Supreme Court precedent.

As Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, spoke about on 60 Minutes, true innovation does not come from the large corporations. Instead, it is some “graduate student” or “crazy person” that makes change, such as the obscure Wright Brothers warping the airplane wings to control flight. Without a patent system, innovators and inventors from all walks of life will be unable to safeguard their intellectual property and profit, violating a central tenet of the patent system. Penalizing the poor students and the visionaries by hindering their chance to protect their technological advances in patent litigation is not justifiable and is not right. Legislation making fundamental changes to the law to thwart innovators (and their backers) getting their say in court is highly suspect and perhaps unconstitutional. Further, in a time when Americans have lost countless manufacturing jobs and have retooled, it does not make sense to weaken something at which Americans are good: innovating and inventing.

Many, many, many patents have issued to cover the physical elements and intuitive steps to make this familiar sequence possible and increasingly reliable and refined. Mechanical elements, i.e., rotating shafts with a gears on each end, have been replaced by a toothed wheel and magnetic sensor and a wire, but the information about where the engine is in its cycle of rotation is the same… To illustrate to the lay person that just because software is the ”tool” being used to “do” things, we are still ”doing” the same things in the same ways for the same reasons. To wit: That, in the modern era, the execution of the ”useful arts” is done using software does not change what is done or the fact that it is a ”useful art”; and, the patentability thereof should be unaffected simply because we ”do” it differently now as compared with how we ”did” it then.

The featured application is a continuation of a patent application that matured into a patent for AT&T in December 2013, some 9 years after it was first filed. The file history shows that after being unable to convince the patent examiner after several final rejections AT&T appealed to the Board, which in May 2013, reversed the examiners rejections. Obviously, given that AT&T has fought so long and all the way to the Board they must believe this innovation to be of some importance. Indeed, this AT&T innovation offers a very practical service that can be applied to a variety of emergency situations. This technology involves a time-sensitive encoded artifact that is affixed to a person or object which can be scanned to communication important information in response to an emergency event.