Nearly Over 30 Years Of Representing Businesses And Their Owners
Michelle Lee, the director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office resigned on June 6, 2017, apparently effective the same day. Michelle Lee was a favorite of large technology companies, many of which lobbied to keep her in place during a Trump administration. By contrast, many inventors and biotechnology companies were unhappy with how she implemented the post-grant review…
Download the PDF here This morning, the Supreme Court agreed to hear Oil States Energy Services v. Greene’s Energy Group. The question presented* by that case is: 1. Whether inter partes review—an adversarial process used by the Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) to analyze the validity of existing patents— violates the Constitution by extinguishing private property rights through a non-Article…
Click here to download the PDF In an opinion handed down on May 30, 2017 in a case titled Impression Products, Inc. v. Lexmark International, Inc., the Supreme Court overruled previous lower court decisions relating to “exhaustion” of patent rights. The impact of this ruling on big companies will be minimal over the long term; the impact on small companies…
By: Jennifer T. Poochigian In an 8-0 decision, SCOTUS ruled that the term “resides” in the patent venue statute, 28 U.S.C. § 1400 subd. (b), shall refer only to the State of incorporation (as applied to domestic corporations). In TC Heartland LLC v. Kraft Foods Group Brands, LLC, the respondent filed a patent infringement suit in the District Court for…
Latches is an equitable doctrine that says you can’t know about a claim you could bring and then wait years before bringing a lawsuit. The idea is that after a while, people should be able to rely on the fact that you haven’t sued to indicate that you won’t. Last year SCOTUS found that latches doesn’t apply to copyright cases. …
Download the PDF here It never made sense to me that design patents — patents that protect an ornamental design instead of a functional aspect of a device — used a formula for determining damages that made them far more valuable than utility patents. District courts have traditionally awarded damages equal to essentially all of the profits generated by the…
Download the PDF here The United States Patent and Trademark Office regularly holds events targeted all the various stakeholders it serves — inventors, startups, big companies, attorneys, trademark owners, etc. The events are all listed on the USPTO website, at https://www.uspto.gov/about-us/events. One event that all inventors should absolutely consider attending is a regional roundtable related to patent subject matter eligibility. Among…
To download the article, “First Amendment v. Limits on Trademarks: On to the Supreme Court” click here In 2015, the Federal Circuit held that “the disparagement provision of [trademark law is] unconstitutional…. We recognize that invalidating this provision may lead to the wider registration of marks that offend vulnerable communities…. But much the same can be (and has been) said…
Download the PDF here Original US Government works are not subject to copyright. The law is about as clear as it can be: Copyright protection under this title is not available for any work of the United States Government, but the United States Government is not precluded from receiving and holding copyrights transferred to it by assignment, bequest, or otherwise.…
By: Gary S. Shuster To download the article, “THE AMERICA INVENTS ACT TURNS FIVE — WHAT INVENTORS NEED TO KNOW” click here The America Invents Act (“AIA”) turned five years old last week. At the time of its adoption, independent inventors were hyper-focused on the switch from “First to Invent” to “First to File”. For example, NPR did a piece…