Patent

Designs for patents

No, I’m not referring to a Cubist masterpiece. Consider the following:  After long, hard work, you’ve created a great design, say, the design above.  Eureka!  Your design would go great with anything.  You can see it on chairs, on baskets, on car seats, on bridges, on tattooed biceps everywhere.  Just think of the possibilities.    But everyone else will want to use […]

gavel of justice

Newsweek has called it the “copyright case of the decade” and it may be right.  Google and Oracle are software titans battling over whether the freely available connections between software platforms (Application Programming Interfaces, or “APIs”) can be protected by copyright law.  APIs are generally free to use, and they enable developers to build programs […]

Designs for patents

Here’s a challenge for these modern times:  How do observant Jews follow the Biblical commandment to observe the Sabbath?  Rabbis generally agree that driving is prohibited, and that using electricity is not prohibited – but using switches to manually turn the flow of electricity on or off is prohibited.  This is why you may have […]

Designs for patents

Mechanical inventions have been free of the uncertainty and chaos created by the Supreme Court in results-driven decisions surrounding the patentability of business methods, medical diagnoses and discoveries, and computer software.  That is, until now. The recent American Axle v Neapco decision of a three-judge panel of the Federal Circuit Court addressed a patent to a method for tuning a drive shaft to […]

Designs for patents

Some patents are valuable and some are not. The claims of a patent determine whether the patent is valuable or not valuable.  If the claims are too ‘narrow;’ that is, if the claims protect too little, then the patent is not very valuable and your competitor can make minor changes to a copy of your product […]

Designs for patents

Imagine the following: You were very sick.  It was touch and go for a while, but you’ve just awakened and feel much better.  You open your eyes and see… nothing. It’s absolutely, completely black, like the deepest cave.  ‘Am I blind?’ you ask yourself out loud, but the sounds of your own voice are all wrong. […]

Designs for patents

In the not too distant past, a person or company unhappy about a patent had two choices:  (a) wait to be sued for patent infringement by the patent owner in Federal court and then challenge the validity of the patent, or (b) preemptively sue the patent owner in Federal Court and ask the court to […]

Many in the U.S. take advantage of low prices offered by Canadian ‘pharmacies’ by purchasing doctor-prescribed patented pharmaceuticals. The Canadian pharmacies are not pharmacies in the traditional sense.  That is, they do not maintain stocks of drugs nor fill prescriptions from their own inventories. Instead, the Canadian pharmacies are “ordering services” that ship pharmaceuticals to  U.S. […]

Designs for patents

 The Navy just received a patent on flying saucer technology.  No, I don’t mean a circular wing that flies like every other aircraft.  I mean a craft that relies on laws of physics that neither Newton nor Einstein would recognize. The patent, by Navy inventor Dr. Salvatore Pais, describes what is literally anti-gravity technology, referred […]

Designs for patents

In last May’s newsletter we told you about proposed changes to the patent statute to, hopefully, correct some of the damage that the Supreme Court has done to the U.S. patent system over the last decade.  Among other things, the Supreme Court has expanded the judge-made categories of inventions that cannot be patented to include […]