Patent

Designs for patents

There are people who wish that the U.S. patent system would just go away.  Their allies successfully lobbied for and passed the ‘America Invents Act’ back in 2011 that resulted in the USPTO patent death squads, also known as the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB).  As we described last month, the PTAB kills patents with impunity […]

Designs for patents

In the America Invents Act, Congress shifted challenges to the validity of patents from the Federal courts to the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB), an arm of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.  The PTAB applies different rules and standards than the Federal courts, rules and standards that favor the patent infringer and not […]

Designs for patents

Fifteen years ago, China did not have much of a patent program.  After all, with a centrally controlled economy and no private property, what good was a patent? Much of that has changed, at least the private property part. The Chinese government identified homegrown innovation and improving the ‘made in China’ brand as crucial to […]

Congress

Many administrations regard the USPTO as a political backwater and the directorship as a holding pen for less-than-ideal candidates. Here’s the shocker: The Administration has appointed a qualified person to head the USPTO.  His name is Andrei Iancu and he is currently the managing partner of a Los Angeles law firm.  He’s a degreed engineer and registered […]

Smart Lady

December 21, 2017 Patent
Designs for patents

Last week Zeitgeist Films released a biopic of Hedy Kiesler Markey, an inventor of U.S. Patent 2,292,387.  This WWII patent envisioned that jumping between radio frequencies would avoid jamming of radio-guided torpedoes.  The U.S. Navy rejected the frequency-hopping invention at the time and did not adopt the technology until much later.  Frequency hopping is now widely […]

pumpkin

It’s Halloween, which, of course, means that it’s time to preserve corpses. Consider Joseph Karwowski’s invention (U.S. patent 748,284 issued December 29, 1903*).  Joe was a Russian national (‘…a subject of the Czar of Russia’) living in New York state.  He was presumably impressed by the ability of waterglass (sodium silicate, or Na2SiO3) to preserve fresh […]

Designs for patents

Each year for the last five years the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has published a massive report on the state of global intellectual property protection.  The report is, frankly, staggering in its ambition.  It provides a report card for IP protection for forty-five countries around the world, including patents, trademarks, copyrights and trade secrets. The report gives us […]

Designs for patents

The answer is ‘yes.’ But why should we care? “Inter Partes Review” or “IPR” is a recent process by which a person infringing a patent can challenge the patent before a panel of USPTO employees.  The USPTO employees are members of the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB).  The person challenging the patent will present […]

Courtroom

The Eastern District of Texas is a large rural Federal judicial district.  The biggest city is about the size of Allentown, Pennsylvania.  Not what you would expect of a hotbed of patent litigation.  Nonetheless, the Eastern District of Texas has dominated patent infringement litigation for years.  In the first quarter of 2017, patent plaintiffs filed […]