Patent Baristas

The USPTO has published in the Federal Register a notice of proposed rulemaking regarding appeals to the USPTOs Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences (BPAI).  The proposed rules are in anticipation of the flood of appeals that will result if (read: when) the new USPTO rules limiting continuation practice go into effect.  (see:  USPTO Proposes […]

Make no mistake about it. This is a story that has an abundance of human drama, which manifests itself in great suffering around the world. Roughly 40 million people worldwide are infected with HIV/AIDS, including more than 1.2 million Americans. These numbers have meaning that numbers cannot convey. The meaning emerges in the stories of […]

David Boundy of Cantor Fitzgerald and Mike Strickland of GlaxoSmithKline attended a meeting with the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to discuss the USPTO’s Changes to Practice for Continuing Applications, Requests for Continued Examination Practice, and Applications Containing Patentably Indistinct Claims (Fed. Reg. 71: 48-61 (January 3, 2006)). The proposed regulations would limit an […]

I received the following note from a reader asking if anyone would have suggestions on the following fact pattern: I am preparing a petition to revive a US application that has gone abandoned, we think unintentionally. There are a number of case specific issues, which are not expressly provided for in MPEP 711.03. In particular, […]

Timir Chheda has prepared a clickable list comparing the Model Rules with the PTO Code, which you can find here: http://www.jmls.edu/ripl/vol5/issue3/chheda2.pdf It’s often important to look at both sets of rules during prosecution.

When properly maintained, a laboratory notebook is important in establishing a permanent record that can be referred to in the future to prove what was done during the course of research. When improperly kept, it may fail to prove what was conceived or invented, and it may fail to fix important critical dates. Laboratory notebooks […]

I received a letter from a reader asking about the current status of the reexamination request on Pfizer’s Viagra (sildenafil citrate) patent (U.S. Pat. No. 6,469,012). I always appreciate hearing from readers and don’t mind trying to answer questions (when I can) so I reviewed the file history. The proceedings are now merged (consolidated into […]

While we’re on the subject of patent re-exam lately, I received a letter from a plucky individual that has decided to file a request for ex parte reexamination of Amazon’s “One-Click” patent (US Patent 5,960,411), using some prior art that he found. It turns out that New Zealander Peter Calveley is one of the actors […]