In response to suggestions from the intellectual property (IP) community that the USPTO adopt some form of a deferred examination procedure, the Patent Office will conduct a public roundtable discussion on the topic on Thursday, February 12, 2009, from 9 a.m.-12:30 p.m. at the agency’s headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia. The goal of the roundtable is […]

Earlier, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) opened the patent examination process for online public participation. With the consent of the inventor, the Peer-to-Patent: Community Patent Review pilot, developed by the New York Law School Institute for Information Law and Policy in cooperation with the USPTO, enables the public to submit prior art […]

The U.S. Supreme Court is being asked to review a decision in a patent case which questions what things are patentable, including software and business strategies.  The applicants have filed a Petition for Writ of Certiorari to the Supreme Court to appeal from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in In re […]

Cordis and Johnson & Johnson tried to get a new trial and judgment as a matter of law (JMOL) following a jury verdict finding that they infringed Boston Scientific’s patent. Boston Scientific v. Cordis Corp. (08-1073).  The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit said that “because the court erred … in failing to […]

Patents Go International International patent filings under WIPO’s Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) grew by 2.4% in 2008, to nearly 164,000 1 applications. While the rate of growth was modest, as compared to an average 9.3% rate of growth in the previous three years, the total number of applications for 2008 represents the highest number of […]

Do you know which companies the most profitable ones? Often, they’re not the best organized, the best run or even the best marketed. It turns out it is not about cutting costs, improving process efficiency and implement best practices – although those are all really noble endeavors. The real driver of profitability is the competitive […]

PatentCluster, a free clustering based patent search engine, provides a different way to search patents.   PatentCluster was founded after observing that existing patent search engines did not make it easy to understand the context of the patent search results and did not articulate the “big picture” of the overall concept of the search. Instead of […]

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Global Intellectual Property Center (GIPC) released its Intellectual Property Protection and Enforcement Manual, a publication designed to help businesses protect their consumers and brands. The manual features case studies on the proven strategies companies are implementing to protect their creative assets from criminal counterfeiting and piracy. The Intellectual Property Protection […]