Posts Tagged: "patent"

Whether your annual patent budget is in the tens of thousands of dollars or the tens of millions of dollars, the pressure to do more with less is becoming increasingly essential, even for critical budget items like the development and protection of patents. In addition to the competitive edge that a strong patent portfolio provides, there are many financial benefits to creating efficiencies in a patent budget. Additionally, being able to apply for patents in multiple jurisdictions will help build your patent portfolio, which is attractive to investors. Finally, well-written and well-translated patent applications can help prevent costs associated with office actions, longer time to grant and litigation.

The featured patent application describes better security systems for smart batteries in use by a wide array of mobile electronic devices. The advanced circuitry of these batteries would allow for the same amount of compatibility among generic chargers while dissuading would-be copiers from cloning batteries. We also discuss some interesting innovations related to computerized key fobs for secure vehicle access and a couple of improvements to integrated circuit and semiconductor manufacturing. Our check-in with Texas Instruments’ recently issued patents continues where we left off with electronics manufacturing technologies. TI was recently awarded the right to protect a couple of new manufacturing system and hardware improvements, including a device that can provide better cleaning of semiconductor wafers without damaging electronic circuitry. We were also piqued by a newly patented system that allows classroom instructors to check the work of their students through their calculators.

When you review file histories as a patent office practice expert it’s an eye-opening experience because sometimes it’s almost inexplicable as to what happened and how it could possibly have happened. And that’s what leads to some of the litigation because of the kinds of things that happen in these cases. It demonstrates why there’s still a place for a patent office practice expert in patent litigations due to the eccentricities of the practice and procedure that lead to peculiar results. An expert is needed to explain how and why these situations happen in the PTO… Sometimes you shake your head in terms of how one thing happened after another that led to a particular result that is defies how proper PTO practice and procedure is defined in the rules of practice and the MPEP.

KUNIN: ”But what is the one thing that can be a break the bank issue? What if the patent owner asserts eight patents against you in a litigation. Can you pick and choose which are the best patents among the eight to challenge? Or are you going to have to file and pay for eight IPRs? At what particular point does it actually become a financial burden for you to go after every asserted patent against you in that litigation in separate IPRs? Either you can try to strategically determine which are the patents which are most harmful to you and most vulnerable and go after them in IPRs, or try to go after all of them in IPRs. But if you go after all of them, you already explained how expensive it is, all right? So let’s assume for argument sake it’s a fairly complex proceeding and it’s costing $300,000 per IPR. So $300,000 times eight is the total cost. What’s the cost of the litigation in defending against all the asserted patents?”

Oracle’s first version of Java 8 will be released on Tuesday, March 18, 2014. If install Java 8 and encounter authentication issues when trying to use EFS Web or Private PAIR the USPTO says that you will need to revert to Java 7 Update 51.

IBM has been the top patenting company for more than 20 years. Therefore, any review of IBM patents can barely touch the surface of the innovative endeavors at this innovative giant. Nevertheless, we did find some interesting patents and applications to discuss, such as our featured patent application, which discloses a system for digitizing human physiological inputs in order to determine emotion. This computer analysis program could detect negative and positive behavioral evidence through facial expressions and voice inputs to determine a more exact emotional state for a user. We also profile some patent applications discussing better means of providing online content and communication services to users. Not every patent application filed by IBM reaches patented status, but the company files so many applications that it’s bound to enjoy a multitude of issued patents every week. Since March started, IBM has been awarded a number of interesting patents that caught our eyes here at IPWatchdog. Patents we discuss include a system for canceling sent e-mails, even after they’ve been opened, as well as methods for creating software programs through the World Wide Telecom Web. We also noticed a patent protecting a system that may be integral to a growing field: the interconnected web of home devices, also known as the “Internet of Things.”

KUNIN: ”Remember though an Act of Congress in 1982 the Federal Circuit was established as the single reviewing court for district court patent appeals to provide uniformity and consistency in the development of the patent laws. And for a couple of decades it was pretty much left unsupervised by the Supreme Court to let the patent law develop more consistency. But now if you look back from 2014 you see that there’s been a sea change in how the Supreme Court has exercised its supervisory role. This may be in part due to the intra-court disagreements in the Federal Circuit decision-making inviting the Supreme Court to take a case. We see that systematically there seems to be a desire of the Supreme Court to get the Federal Circuit, in the area of patent law, to apply general law principles. No special rules for patent cases need exist for legal aspects that are not unique to the patent statutes.”

All of this has to make you wonder whether any new patent legislation is necessary at this time. The House of Representatives has already passed new patent legislation that focuses on patent litigation and the perceived abuses. Reasonable minds can perhaps differ about whether the measures being discussed are good, bad or would do anything to address the manipulation of the judicial process by nefarious actors. The facts suggest, however, that patent litigation is declining and the administrative trials are increasing beyond expectations. This is significant because the administrative trials were created in order to offer defendants a better, cheaper avenue to challenge patents outside of litigation. So why not allow the reforms of the AIA time to work before once again tinkering with the patent laws and potentially upsetting the incentive to innovate?

What we found were plenty of interesting inventions regarding consumer Internet technologies that will interest plenty of our readers, so we’ve gathered some of the best patent applications and issued patents assigned to Yahoo! by the USPTO. We start our tour today with a look at a novel system of providing map information to a mobile device user. Using spatial metadata collected from a plurality of smart and “dumb” devices, users can access this system to pull contextual map information about individual buildings. We also discuss a couple of patent applications directed towards systems of collecting contact information for a user’s profile as well as a couple of systems for mood analysis. Communication technologies are protected in a number of Yahoo! patents that we decided to look at today. These include a messaging service that incorporates online gaming activity as well as a system of better prioritizing and organizing received digital messages. We were also impressed by a couple of issued patents that protect better image recognition and news authority ranking systems.

Chief Judge Michel’s brief makes two major recommendations regarding the essential question of software’s patentability. First, Michel states that the criteria for patent eligibility under Section 101 should only exclude those inventions that are clearly patent-ineligible… In his conclusion, Michel argues that, although all patent applications must first be reviewed under Section 101 for eligibility, the evaluations that take place under Sections 102, 103 and 112 should be applied in the overwhelming majority of patent validity cases. In the case of an implied exclusion under Section 101, as in this case, ineligibility should only be applied in the clearest cases where the patent would preempt the most fundamental building blocks of technology.

The Keynote Address will be given at 9:00 am by Michelle Lee, the new Deputy Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Deputy Director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Deputy Director Lee joined the USPTO on January 13, 2014, but has yet to have much of a public schedule. Instead, Deputy Director Lee has largely been engaging in a series of one-on-one private meetings with various stakeholders. This will be one of her first public appearances, which in and of itself makes this even noteworthy.

The halls of the USPTO are largely populated by Google’s recent innovations, as this corporation will regularly receive upwards of 50 patents or more each week…. The featured patent application for today highlights a novel system of using mobile devices to improve something millions of Americans do every day: order out for food. This Internet-based system of ordering enables more precise delivery, better estimation of arrival times as well as secure payments for food and other items. We also profile some patent applications pertaining to speech recognition technologies and online searches for flight itineraries. Google has one of the strongest patent portfolios among American technological firms, and we’ve uncovered a list of recently issued patents from the USPTO that improve the user experience for online and mobile technologies. We discuss three patents that protect new ways of interacting with a smartphone through novel gestures, including a system that can convert words from an image into digital text. We also look into a patent that protects new methods of ranking news stories online for the Google News reader.

This case had been made Special on the Patent Prosecution Highway in October of 2013 because of a favorable Written Opinion from a PCT Searching Authority. For a Special case, USPTO’s case management system normally starts ringing an alarm on the Examiner’s desk after a couple of months. So we should have seen an Office Action at least a month ago, maybe two months ago. But that only works if the case has been assigned to an Examiner. Often the USPTO first assigns the case to a SPE and then it is left to the SPE to figure out which Examiner in the SPE’s art unit should actually examine the case. This case got assigned to the SPE in a particular art unit. Let’s call him “SPE V”. It seems that SPE V decided that this case had been misclassified and should not have gone to his art unit. So he tried to get rid of it.

The view of the USPTO now is that a claim to purified amazonic acid is not patent-eligible because there is no structural difference between the purified acid in the claim and the acid in the leaves, and the claim does not include features that demonstrate that the recited product is markedly different from what exists in nature. … It is, to say the least, unclear why the USPTO, without public consultation seeks to remove the patent-eligibility of isolated or purified natural products of new medical or other utility, which has been taken as a given in the US for 100 years and is consistent with practice in Europe and other major industrialised countries.