Patent Baristas

The New York Times had a great overview of the new tax boondoggle that is allowing the biggest drug makers to return as much as $75 billion in profits from international havens to the United States while paying a fraction of the normal tax rate. The break is part of the American Jobs Creation Act, […]

The President’s Council on Bioethics has released a report that describes potential ways around the objections that have been raised against embryonic stem cell research. Because obtaining stem cells requires the destruction of a human embryo, many researchers find performing research with these cells ethically unacceptable. Stem cells are unspecialized cells that can renew themselves […]

The National Inventors Hall of Fame added its latest class of inductees for 2005. The new inductees include the inventors of Streptomycin and the photocopier along with Grammy-Award winner Les Paul, inventor of the solid body electric guitar in 1946. The 2005 honorees are: LIVING C. Donald Bateman: Ground Proximity Warning System (GPWS); Robert Gundlach: […]

The Baristas received a nice mention on the IPKat blog, noted for “fishing for IP stories for YOU” by Jeremy Phillips and Ilanah Simon from the Queen Mary Intellectual Property Research Institute. They write about copyright, patent, trade mark and privacy/confidentiality issues from a UK and European perspective. We get our updates from the Kats […]

Blue Cross/Blue Shield and other insurers have sued GlaxoSmithKline in a dispute over the generics market of Paxil. The insurers are alleging that Glaxo has been gaming the patent system to keep cheaper generic alternatives to the antidepressant off the market. Glaxo lost its patent on Paxil in 2003. They accuse Glaxo of violating federal […]

The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) heard arguments from Monsanto Corporation on the patentability of genetic markers, known as Expressed Sequence Tags (ESTs). (In re Fisher, Fed. Cir., No. 04-1465; May 3, 2005) Monsanto argued that its application should not have been rejected by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) for […]

Somewhere around the world, likely around Sunday, May 8 or Monday, May 9, 2005, the one billionth cumulative acre of biotech crops was planted, as reported by the policy analysts for Truth About Trade and Technology (TATT). Just how big is a billion acres? It’s really big. A billion square acres would cover the entire […]

The Washington Post reported that a three-judge panel for the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia said the Federal Communications Commission had exceeded its authority in requiring built-in, anti-piracy technology to let broadcasters and studios prevent digital shows from being copied. The “broadcast flag” would have been required in digital televisions […]