Patent Baristas

In a nonprecedential opinion, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit held that extrinsic evidence is great when it’s being used against you, bad if you try to use it to help your patent. The court stated that although extrinsic evidence cannot be used to supplement a non-enabling specification, such evidence can […]

I like coffee and keep up on coffee-related items.  While a frequent patron of Starbucks, I think small, individual coffee shops bring a fresh perspective to the coffee experience.  And so we watch with sadness as many small operators are shut out by the coffee juggernaut. Now a federal judge has declared that coffee shop […]

Editors of the ABA Journal today announced they have selected Patent Baristas as one of the top 100 best websites by lawyers, for lawyers, as selected from their directory of more than 1,500 blawgs in dozens of categories. The Journal is now asking lawyers to vote on their favorites in each of the Blawg 100’s […]

In Biomedical Patent Management Corporation v. State Of California, Department Of Health Services (06-1515), 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 […]

In a nonprecedential opinion, the U.S. Court Of Appeals For The Federal Circuit held that just because a case involves patents doesn’t mean that you get federal jurisdiction.  Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) v. Xenon Pharmaceuticals (07-1026-33). The court ruled that it has no jurisdiction over the case because it does not present a claim […]

Managing patents is often a time consuming and disjointed effort, especially for small companies (or even larger ones running lean).  Fortunately, a number of companies have been mixing things up on the internet in an attempt to provide order to the chaos. One new effort is WizPatent, a patent management solution offering to “Extract the Juice from your […]

According to a report from the Government Accountability Office, the time it takes to examine and allow patent applications has increased due to “increases in the volume and complexity of patent applications.” In FY 2007, USPTO’s patent examiners: Examined 362,227 applications – the highest number in history. Quality compliance was 96.5 percent – equaling last […]

PatentFizz is a site that claims to be a place where members of the community can comment on individual patents and it also has a few tricks up its sleeve. They recently rolled out some improvements to their FirstPage Reports product, which gives you a single .pdf document containing the first page of every patent document […]