Patent Baristas

As mentioned in the AmLaw Daily, Dennis Crouch’s Patently-O blog reported on a newly published patent application by Halliburton Energy Services.  The patent application has claims to what can only be described as a method of doing business when your business is patent trolling, i.e., getting rights to a patent and asserting it against infringers. […]

The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit handed down the long awaited en banc decision on In re Bilski (07-1130) in which the court looked at the question of when does a claim that contains both mental and physical steps create patent-eligible subject matter and whether a method or process must result in a […]

Noting that the KSR v. Teleflex decision had immediate effect of making patents more difficult to obtain — allowances of patent applications declined 43% in the first quarter of this year alone — Robert Yeager of the law firm K&L Gates LLP discusses these matters in a recently published “Legal Backgrounder” by the Washington Legal […]

As we saw in the Wyeth v. Dudas case, the US District Court for the District of Columbia overturned the USPTO’s interpretation of 35 USC § 154 (the statute that prescribes patent terms). Section 154 grants extensions of patent terms for certain kinds of PTO delay.  However, Congress says you can’t double-dip, i.e., to the […]

On September 30, 2008, the US District Court for the District of Columbia overturned the interpretation of 35 USC § 154 (the statute that prescribes patent terms) by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (PTO).  See Wyeth v. Dudas, No. 07-1492 (D.D.C. September 30, 2008). Section 154(a)(2) establishes a term of 20 years from […]

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) published some new rules that will improve (their word, not ours) the process of ex parte appeals before the USPTO’s Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences (BPAI). The rules are supposed to help to streamline the appeal process and lead to more timely Board decisions.  We’ll see. The […]

Greg Aharonian at Internet Patent News Service posted a note about a possible increase in double-patenting rejections as the U.S. Patent Office. In a complaint he received, a reader questions whether this is an orchestrated implementation of “directives to frustrate patent applicants to achieve their misguided purpose.” As an example, the reader noted that the […]

The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has published updated patent examiner training materials regarding the examination of patent applications under the written description requirement (35 U.S.C. § 112, first paragraph).  That is, in order to obtain a valid patent, an applicant must include in a description adequately disclosing the invention and how to […]