Posts Tagged: "year in review"

Trademarks in 2022: Recounting the Most High-Profile Trademark Developments of the Year

This year saw an increased focus on the extraterritorial application of the Lanham Act, setting up a showdown at the Supreme Court in 2023. The last year also saw cases pressing the intersection of the Lanham Act with the First Amendment and artistic expression—both in the physical world and in the metaverse—and some rulings that will help clarify the likelihood of confusion analysis in various circuits.
As 2022 comes to an end, we look forward to what 2023 has in store.

The IP News that Mattered Most in 2022, According to You

Here we are again at the end of a year—this one the first in several where courts and business proceeded mostly as usual and relatively free of shutdowns and delays due to the pandemic. We had surprising denials at the Supreme Court, expected rulings from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, a flurry of activity from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) under newly appointed Director, Kathi Vidal, and some exciting precedents set in the rapidly evolving area of inventions and art created by artificial intelligence machines, among other developments. Below, some of our readers weigh in on what IP news mattered most to them in 2022—add your thoughts in the comments below!

mRNA IP and Competitive Landscape: 2021 in Review – Part II, Sanofi, Startups, Conclusions and Outlook

This article, originally published on 12/27/2021, was updated on 1/12/2022 and republished on 1/13/2022 to include information that was omitted in error, beginning after “Conclusions and Outlook”.

In Part I of this post, we provided an update on three lead pioneers in the mRNA IP space, Moderna, BioNTech and CureVac. In this post we profile Sanofi, Arcturus, eTheRNA and other mRNA companies and offer conclusions. Sanofi (NASDAQ: SNY), headquartered in Paris, FR, acquired mRNA pioneer Translate Bio in September 2021 for approximately $3.2 billion and mRNA startup Tidal Therapeutics in April 2021 for approximately $470 million. With its acquisition of Translate alone, Sanofi obtained an mRNA pipeline of nine candidates (two in the clinic), hundreds of patents, and undoubtedly valuable mRNA-based technical and regulatory know-how.

The Top 10 Patents of 2021: Improved Eye Contact in Video Calls, Targeted Ads Based on Conversation Samples, and Analyzing Toxicity in Social Media Content

With the close of another year upon us, IPWatchdog is returning to an annual feature with its Top 10 list of issued U.S. patents during 2021. While it’s impossible to produce a definitive list of the ten most important patents in terms of future commercialization, the following list reflects a series of innovations that either represent important advances in burgeoning areas of technology, or practical innovations that address many of the recurring problems that our world has been facing during the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. From reducing the awkward nature of Zoom calls, during which it’s impossible to maintain genuine eye contact, to vehicle technologies using Bayesian inference models to predict the lane change behavior of nearby drivers, these patents offer an expansive view of the exciting state of invention during this early stage of the 2020s.

Top 2021 FRAND/RAND Licensing Developments in the United States: Part II

This is Part II of a two-part article discussing FRAND (fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory) licensing developments taking place in the United States in 2021. Read Part I here. After a slow summer on the FRAND licensing front, the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit’s ruling in the matter of HTC v. Ericsson came in the dog days of August. As we wrote about here, the August 31 ruling dealt with, amongst other things, an appeal challenging the district court’s instructions to the jury regarding whether or not the license terms offered by Ericsson were FRAND and, more specifically, with respect to the issue of apportionment. Beyond finding that the failure to give instructions on an undisputed issue did not impair HTC’s ability to present its claims, the majority found that HTC’s proposed instructions “were not ‘substantially correct’ statements of law”.