Patent Baristas

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments on the issue of patent exhaustion — and that doesn’t mean people who are tired of hearing about patents. No, the patent exhaustion doctrine, commonly referred to as the first sale doctrine, is triggered by an unconditional sale and was set way back in Mitchell v. Hawley in 1873. […]

If you’re like most people, you come across a lot of documents in your life. Many go into the trash — and deservedly so — but many just can’t seem to find a home. You want to keep them for reference or for sharing but you don’t know where to put them. Enter docstoc.com. Aptly […]

Jon Gowshall, a UK patent attorney at Forresters, has just let us know that the French ratification of the London Agreement was deposited yesterday, 29th January 2008. The Agreement will come into force on 1st May 2008, and will apply to all European Patents granted after that day. What is the London Agreement? The London […]

Monsanto sued Bayer Bioscience claiming that four Bayer patents relating to chimeric genes, including U.S. Patent Nos. 5,545,565, are invalid and not enforceable. After the district court declared the four patents unenforceable for inequitable conduct Bayer appealed. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit agreed after finding their researcher was less than forthcoming […]

The Secretary of Commerce has delegated responsibility for administering the National Medal of Technology and Innovation to the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).  The Medal, presented each year by the President of the United States, is the nation’s highest honor for technological achievement. The Medal is awarded to innovators whose efforts have made profound […]

In Biomedical Patent Management v. State Of California, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit held that a state’s initial waiver of Eleventh Amendment sovereign immunity – when it intervened in an earlier, related action that was dismissed for improper venue — doesn’t mean that it waived sovereign immunity under the Eleventh Amendment […]

Abbott Labs had one of those days. The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed the District Court’s finding that Abbott infringed Innogenetics’ patented Hepatitis C Virus genotyping technology, U.S. Patent No. 5,846,704. The Federal Circuit did reverse and remande the earlier judgment that claim 1 of the ‘704 patent was not anticipated by […]

As a source of amusement, Modern Mechanix has a piece about how the Patent Office has become a national disgrace (in June 1930!). In the article, written for Popular Science Monthly, the author relates how, at the time it was written, there were nearly 118,000 applications for patents piled up in Washington in the greatest […]