Nearly Over 30 Years Of Representing Businesses And Their Owners
There are plenty of “gotchas” that inventors face. We will list some of these in a future post, but this alone should be enough: Simply leaving out a line in the patent application wiped out a patent that E*Trade was allegedly infringing. There will never be a trial on the merits because the lawyers made one mistake that invalidated the…
A federal district court judge has struck down California’s AB 1687, a law which forbade a popular film industry website from publishing certain truthful age-related information about actors, finding it in violation of the First Amendment. In 2016, IMDb.com, Inc. sued the State of California to challenge the constitutionality of the law. The Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and…
A new article titled “‘Worst of Both Worlds’ FOSTA Signed Into Law, Completing Section 230’s Evisceration” was just posted to law professor Eric Goldman’s Technology & Marketing Law Blog. Eric’s post is well worth reading in full. Eric notes that major services, including Google and Microsoft, are taking steps to ban legal content in the aftermath of FOSTA’s passage. Eric…
My 200th United States patent issued today, titled Device Power and Resource Management. According to data that I analyzed in the blog post I made when I received my 100th issued patent, there are well under 1,000 people in the world with that many issued patents. I know the patent system from a unique vantage point as a Harvard-trained attorney, prolific inventor,…
Olivia de Havilland will celebrate her 102nd birthday on July 1. She was famous as an actor, starring in such films as Gone With the Wind and winning two Academy Awards (losing a third one to her sister, Joan Fontaine). Among lawyers, though, she was perhaps most famous for her role as the plaintiff in de Havilland v. Warner Bros. …
This morning, the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals revived the long-running case of Oracle America, Inc. v. Google LLC. in a 56-page ruling. The ruling is particularly important to programmers, as it holds that Google’s copying of the declaring code and structure, sequence, and organization (“SSO”)* of an Oracle-owned Application Programming Interface, or “API”, is not fair use as a…
After a massive dispute, streaming services will now be required to pay more for the music they play. The Copyright Royalty Board ruled to increase royalty payments to songwriters and music publishers from music streaming companies by 43.8 percent (they go into effect for interactive streaming and limited download services for the years 2018-2022). This jump is the biggest rate…
The bargain envisioned in the United States Constitution is that inventors disclose how to practice an invention, making the knowledge available to the world, in exchange for a time-limited monopoly. Such a disclosure would be useless if it were not made available to the public. Similarly, it is common for people reviewing an issued patent to ignore the “prosecution history”…
There are generally two ways to exploit the value of intellectual property rights: use the property yourself or transfer the rights to someone else to use. A transfer of rights – whether in the form of an assignment or license – is often an attractive option for IP owners since it is not always possible or practical for an owner…
Patent owners have long complained that the Post-Grant Review Proceedings (“PGR”) created in the America Invents Act tilt strongly in favor of invalidating patents. The PGR procedures are so effective at destroying patent rights that the former Chief Judge of the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals has called the administrative panels deciding PGRs “death squads destroying property rights.” Indeed, patent…