Posts Tagged: "patents"

During a recent trip organized by AIPLA’s Special Committee on Intellectual Property Practice in Israel, I had the pleasure of meeting the enthusiastic and tireless Asa Kling, who is the Director of the Israel Patent Office and Commissioner of Patents, Trademarks & Designs. Since stepping into the role in 2011, he has focused on ensuring that Israel’s patent office matches Israel’s status as one of the world’s foremost technological innovators. After the trip, I had the honor of asking Commissioner Kling a few questions over the phone.

On March 19, 2013, the Unites States Patent and Trademark Office issued U.S. Patent No. 8,401,009 to Twitter. The Twitter patent is titled: Device Independent Message Distribution Platform. It seems to me that the other social media platforms are utilizing similar functionality as well. I suppose that is a very good thing for Twitter! Depending on how strong this patent ultimately is and what Twitter wants to do with it, social media at its core may have been patented by Twitter.

Microsoft Corporation was a huge winner at the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office this past week, as the Washington State-based computer software developer received 65 patents from the USPTO and had another 49 patent applications published. Many of Microsoft’s more intriguing applications deal with upgrades in responsiveness to user input, including e-mail address book synchronization and a collection manager for content users follow online. Microsoft also received a patent that improves the parsing of handwritten digital text for conversion into textual characters.

On March 28, Apple Inc. appeared in court in Shanghai to defend charges that Siri, its voice-recognition, personal-assistant software, allegedly infringes a Chinese patent. The plaintiff and owner of the patent, Zhizhen Internet Technology Co., claims its version of the software has over 100 million users in China and is requesting the court to ban all manufacturing or sales of Apple’s product in China. This was not the first time Apple faced patent infringement claims in China. Last summer a Taiwanese man sued the company in China for alleged infringement relating to its Facetime technology.

In my opinion the best way to judge the success or failure of the patent system is by looking broadly at the type of competition it enables or disables in the marketplace. And that doesn’t mean focusing solely on patent litigation statistics – of course there are going to be fights when such a high stakes prize as mobile computing is up for grabs and of course firms competing with such different business models are going to come into conflict. But look at what that competition has done for innovation and product advances and for consumer choice and pricing. You need the option of patent protection to provide the necessary freedom of choice in market approach, (whether it is open, proprietary or a blend of both), to enable competition between firms employing different market approaches and the innovation engendered by that competition.. The correct focus for this issue is not the intrinsic merit of the concept of patent protection, but rather what the existence of patents does to promote business model diversity and what that in turn does to promote innovation. This is the important point and at least in my view it seems clear that having patents enables more business model diversity and consequently more innovation than not having them.

The Federal Register Notice explains that currently there are approximately 41,000 registered patent practitioners, with at least 75% of the roster of patent practitioners being attorneys who are admitted in one or more States. Given that the ABA Model Rules have been adopted by 49 states and the District of Columbia, nearly all of the attorneys registered to practice at the USPTO are already professionally governed by ethics rules modeled from the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct. Thus, this change should not be considered to be a substantive change to the rules that apply to patent attorneys.Indeed, the Federal Register Notice explains that this USPTO efforts “benefits and reduces costs for most practitioners by clarifying and streamlining their professional responsibility obligations.” Of course, for those who are patent agents, however, the rules will be different.

This past week was another very prolific one for Apple, as the California-based electronic device developer received 35 patents and had another 36 applications published by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office. Many patent applications were concerned with the ways computer users interact with their systems, and we see a number of upgrades to graphical user interfaces coming for device address books and online stores. Of the patents issued to Apple, one protects a webpage retrieval method that can help browsers save a lot of time while searching for information on the Internet.

Patent litigants have long expected an appeal to follow nearly every jury verdict and that a key question (if not the key question) on appeal will be the district court’s construction of one or more disputed claim terms. Syntrix’s recent infringement verdict against Illumina would be seen as no exception if not for what happened the very next day — the Federal Circuit’s decision to rehear en banc the panel’s decision in Lighting Ballast Control LLC v. Philips Electronics N. Am. Corp. to consider whether to reset the standard of review for claim construction, long recognized as a question of law reviewed de novo on appeal.

Federal Circuit Chief Judge Rader recently delivered an important and noteworthy defense of the U.S. patent system the recent annual meeting of the Association of University Technology Managers (AUTM). His ideas have merit, but let’s not presume that patent litigation reform is all that is needed or all that can be done to help. I believe that Chief Judge Rader and other patent system users should focus on additional reforms that could contribute in a substantive way.

Happy Easter everyone! It is that time of the year where children go searching for eggs full of candy hidden by a giant rabbit, or perhaps awaken to a basket full of candy also mysteriously delivered by said giant rabbit! So what better way to celebrate Easter than by reading patents? Here are a couple patents with an Easter theme to help celebrate the occasion in patent style! Also, as an added bonus at the bottom I give you the top 10 reasons why chocolate Easter bunnies make better gifts than real bunnies, courtesy of the National Confectioners Association (via the Easter Bunny himself)!

Essentially you take a topical analgesic, cool it, remove it from the cooling environment and then apply. If this claim gets patented it will be extraordinarily embarrassing for the USPTO. But what exactly was Johnson & Johnson thinking when they tried to obtain coverage with this ridiculously broad claim? Just several weeks ago they were in front of Congress complaining about specious patent claims being brought in litigation.

IPXI is the first financial exchange that facilitates non-exclusive licensing and trading of intellectual property rights with market-based pricing and standardized terms. Earlier this week word came from the Intellectual Property Exchange International Inc. (IPXI) that the U.S. Department of Justice Antitrust Division issued its Business Review Letter (BRL) upon the culmination of its eight-month review. The DOJ believes that the IP Exchange business model proposed by IPXI is capable of producing market efficiencies in the patent licensing arena and is likely to be pro-innovation. Although no permission is required of the DOJ before IPXI opens its exchange, having this review of the DOJ Antitrust Division complete has to make IPXI and Exchange participants much more at ease as the move closer toward their attempt to revolutionize IP licensing.

The House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, and the Internet on March 14, 2013, heard from six witnesses that the business of “patent assertion entities” (PAEs) is inflicting severe harm on a broad range of technology users. The witnesses at the hearing agreed that, when confronted PAE demand letters on frivolous claims, settlements by and large are economically unavoidable.

International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) is an international business technology consultant and developer headquartered in Armonk, New York. As the top patenting company for the last 20 years, every week you can expect to see at least a few patents on computer systems and other technologies where IBM is the assignee. This past week was a very light one for the company with no patents and only four patent applications published by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office; most of these deal with mirroring data for backup computer systems. The previous week was much more fruitful, and included an application pertaining to user-responsive computer interfaces.

Patent and technology firm, Intellectual Ventures (IV), recently brought a new complaint against computer security company, Symantec, claiming that the company infringed on three of its patents. To be specific, the complaint alleges that three of Symantec’s products (Replicator, Veritas Volume Replicator, and ApplicationHA) “actively, knowingly and intentionally” infringed on three separate IV patents. Symantec was also sued as part of a different complaint by IV back in 2010, along with Trend Micro, McAfee, and Point Software Technologies.