All posts by: Robert Yarbrough

Reps. John Conyers (D – Michigan) and Lamar Smith (R – Texas), the chairman and ranking Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, are trying to resolve the problems of patent pendency and the current revenue shortfall at the United States Patent and Trademark Office (“PTO”).  “Pendency” is the time from filing a patent application until […]

The reports of the death of patent reform have been greatly exaggerated. A bill labeled ‘patent reform’ has been proposed for each of the last several years, but has never been able to garner the votes necessary to pass both the House and Senate. The reason is that the various patent constituencies have very different […]

The PTO needs more examiners and better information technology infrastructure to bring down pendency of applications and improve the quality of issued patents, but does not have the money to pay for them.  For years, Congress has taken the fees paid by applicants for patents and trademarks and used those funds for other purposes, leaving […]

Under U.S. law, a patent owner can sue an infringer in U.S. Federal court if the infringer “without authority makes, uses, offers to sell or sells any patented invention in the United States. .” But what if the invention is sold by a business located outside the U.S. and shipped to a customer located in […]

One of the requirements for obtaining a patent is to provide an application that contains a very specific description of the invention, or in the words of the patent statute: “The specification shall contain a written description of the invention, and of the manner and process of making and using it, in such full, clear, […]

The PTO announced a pilot program to speed review of patent applications for green technologies.  A pending application can be advanced in the review queue if the application falls within any of several pre-approved technologies and if the applicant submits a petition to ‘make the application special.’  The PTO is waiving petition fees for the […]

Global Findability, which alleged in a lawsuit that Nicholas Cage’s character in the new film “Knowing”  infringed Global Findability’s patent 7,107,286.  The patent addresses storing global position and altitude information “into a single discrete all-natural number geospatial coordinate measurement representation for identification of a geospatial positional location. . .”  In the movie, Cage’s character perceives […]

A question we hear often is, “Don’t I have to wait until my patent issues to_________?”  The blank is usually filled in with such items as “raise capital”, “license my invention”, or “disclose my invention to others.”  In each case, the answer is an emphatic “NO”.  And it’s a good thing, too, since the time […]

The PTO announced a pilot program to allow small entities with two or more patent applications to move to the front of the review line by dropping an existing patent application.   As a rule of thumb, a small entity is a business with fewer than five hundred employees.   The theory is that a small […]

There are more changes to the patent system to report, and we are hopeful. In our September newsletter, we told you about the ‘count’ system used by the PTO to measure the productivity of patent examiners.  In the bad old days (that is, during the last few years of the last administration), examiners had incentive […]