Nearly 30 Years Of Representing Businesses And Their Owners
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…
Download a PDF of the article here By Darryl J. Horowitt If you run a company that uses computers that are accessible to the Internet, cyber security should be important to you because of the importance of preserving the confidential information in your computer system. What is cyber security? Simply stated, it relates to the preservation of electronically stored information…
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…