Posts Tagged: "Press Releases"

Hricik brings with him more than 25 years of experience handling patent infringement suits and complex commercial litigation. Most recently, he served as clerk to the Chief Judge of the Federal Circuit, Randall R. Rader, and now acts as a professor at Mercer University School of Law teaching Patent Law and Litigation, Ethics, and Federal Civil Procedure. He also is a nationally known speaker on patent, ethical and procedural issues.

The International Intellectual Property Institute (IIPI), founded and headed by former United States Patent and Trademark Office Commissioner Bruce Lehman, has recently brought in two seasoned intellectual property attorneys. Andrew Hirsch, who worked closely with Lehman at the Department of Commerce, has been named the Executive Director of IIPI, and Richard Litman, is now its General Counsel. Both will focus on IIPI’s quest to help academic, industry and government leaders to adopt the best international IP practices and models for innovation based economic and societal development.

On December 12, 2013, Members of the House and Senate introduced bipartisan legislation that would allow the United States or any state or local government to register official insignia for federal trademark protection. This bill would amend the Trademark Act of 1946, also known as the Lanham Act, to allow the Federal government as well as all State and local governments to register with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) marks consisting of their flag, coat of arms and other official seals.

Seth Waxman, of Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr, a former Solicitor General and Soverain’s lead attorney, says, “Newegg is taking this case seriously and so should the Supreme Court. Newegg’s attempt to reargue the facts only confirms that this case should have gone to the jury.” Waxman says, “The judicial overreach that occurred in this case is not an isolated incident, but rather the acceleration of a trend in the Court of Appeals that presents a broader threat to all who rely on the stability and predictability of the patent system.”

Crowell & Moring LLP announces Teresa (Terry) Stanek Rea, former acting and deputy director of the USPTO and acting and deputy under secretary of commerce for intellectual property returns as a partner in the firm’s Intellectual Property Group.

The App Developers Alliance is joining with law schools nationwide to help startups battle patent trolls. The Law School Patent Troll Defense Network is a consortium of law school clinics that will provide free legal representation to small app developers and other entrepreneurs that have been threatened or sued by patent trolls. Clinics participating in the Network may also represent the Alliance in major patent cases affecting developers and the app community.

I spend a lot of time every day and my staff also spends time every day looking through press releases, looking for stories. And I can’t tell you how many times I have come across something that I knew was good but I couldn’t get any information on. I mean literally no information other than the self-congratulating, back slapping stuff that you see in two or three paragraphs in a press release. So that is one of the things I want to talk to you about today. How do you get your story to those journalists and reporters out there who care? Continually there are calls from detractors who want to change the technology transfer system regardless of how wildly successful it has been.

I don’t know what is going on at Chadbourne & Parke, but I do know I know that Walt and John were both at Morgan & Finnegan and left for Chadbourne over 7 years ago. Morgan & Finnegan subsequently filed for bankruptcy ?several years later. Over time the best attorneys were slowly bled from Morgan & Finnegan, and virtually all of the rainmakers left. There were obviously internal problems of one kind or another, likely of a structural nature compounded by top earners and rainmakers leaving. Now I see top level attorneys leaving Chadbourne & Parke, one of them my friend who had enough sense to get out of Morgan & Finnegan years before they went bankrupt. Could this be a sign of what may become over the next several years for Chadbourne & Parke?

“I am honored to have been elected President of an outstanding organization that plays a pivotal role in the global IP landscape,” Mr. Lewis said. “The coming year promises to be one of continuing change as the evolving global economy and ongoing advances in technology raise new challenges for the IP industry. I am excited to have the opportunity to work with AIPLA and its membership to address these issues and help to ensure that our intellectual property system remains strong and serves the best interests of its participants.”

McCann, who is now a partner in the firm’s Intellectual Property group, joins Thompson Hine in the firm’s Washington, D.C. office, coming over to the firm from Venable LLP. The addition of McCann comes on the heels of other recent additions of what the firm refers to as “top tier laterals.” McCann is a patent attorney with more than 30 years of experience, focuses his practice on the development and defense of patent rights in the chemical, biological, mechanical and software/business method arts.

A story of such potential liability is now playing out in Taser International v. Stinger, (Case No. 2:09-cv-289 (D. Nev.)). Taser, the developer of the TASER weapon for use by law enforcement, originally sued Stinger Systems for selling devices that infringed a number of Taser patents. In the course of the action, however, Stinger issued a series of press releases regarding its patent dispute with Taser, among them a press release reporting on a parallel reexamination proceeding. In a second action, Taser accuses Stinger, Stinger’s CEO and Stinger’s attorney of various business torts, all centering on allegations that Stinger, ita CEO and its attorney issued misleading press releases, damaging Taser’s reputation and stock price. According to Taser, one press release issued by Stinger in May 2007, caused its stock price to drop $40,000,000.

Vanderheyden joins AOP from the legal software and solutions corporation LexisNexis, where he was Vice President and Managing Director, Global IP Solutions. While at LexisNexis, he helped to develop TotalPatent, a leading patent research tool supported by the world’s largest patent database, and PatentOptimizer, a software tool that conducts word-level analysis of the legal integrity of a patent or application. Prior to LexisNexis, Vanderheyden served as Vice President of Marketing and Business Development for IP.com, a global patent and non-patent literature database, where he re-established the corporate brand, launched new products, and developed a patent for a new market opportunity. Vanderheyden held previous positions at IBM and founded Delphion, the first to make US patents searchable on the web.

The EPO was ranked first for patent quality among the world’s five largest patent offices for the second consecutive year in a survey of corporate and private practice IP professionals conducted jointly by Thomson Reuters and Intellectual Asset Management (IAM) magazine. The annual benchmarking survey, published in the June issue of the magazine, finds that the EPO leads by a wide margin in terms of perceived patent quality, and has even improved its position over last year.

The Innovation Alliance is disappointed that the America Invents Act as introduced today in the House of Representatives does not include some important safeguards against the potential for abuse of the post-grant review procedures at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). In particular, the bill includes a weak threshold for ‘second window’ inter partes review proceedings, one that will allow virtually all challenges to proceed to a trial-like hearing before an administrative patent judge. We believe a higher threshold is needed to enable the USPTO to manage the increased workload of the new administrative review system fairly and efficiently by screening out meritless or unsubstantiated petitions.

The Humanitarian Award honors work that aims to reduce human suffering significantly or enhance the human experience in a way that has a clear and direct benefit to society. Additional consideration will be given to approaches that are at a turning point and may potentially have immeasurable influence. The Award and a prize of $10,000 will be presented at the 2011 BIO International Convention, in Washington, DC on June 27-30, 2011.