Patent Baristas

The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is increasing the availability of its patent electronic filing system, Electronic Filing System—Web (EFS-Web) by providing a new contingency option when the primary portal to EFS-Web has an unscheduled outage. Previously, the entire EFS-Web system is not available to the users during such an outage. The contingency […]

Recently, the courts looked at the question of whether separate enantiomers can have “first commercial marketing or use” status for purposes of patent term extension under 35 U.S.C. § 156. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, after consulting with the FDA, had granted an extension for US Pat. No. 5,053,407, which is exclusively licensed to […]

Inventors Eye, a new electronic publication by the United States Patent and Trademark Office is a bimonthly publication for the independent inventor community. According to the USPTO, Inventors Eye is for and about America’s independent and small entity inventor community. It is a community that has always been a vital and vibrant part of America’s […]

The U.S. Patent Office has learned of a new technological advance called “rss feed” and has instituted the system for the USPTO Systems Status and Availability site a mere 10 years after Netscape started using it. On the Electronic Business Center, you can check the web page for the latest information on operating status and […]

India and United States have signed two inter-governmental agreements on Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) to help prevent what they say is the misappropriation of traditional knowledge through mistaken issuance of patents, what some call biopiracy. ‘Biopiracy’ describes a process in which living resources or traditional knowledge and practices are patented, thus applying intellectual property restrictions […]

In the the Tafas v. Kappos lawsuit, Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office David Kappos and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office filed a joint motion for dismissal of the appeal and to vacate the judgment of the district court below because the USPTO […]

The next quarterly meeting of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s Biotechnology and Chemical Pharmaceutical Customer Partnership is scheduled: Wednesday, December 9, 2009 from 10:00 am to 5:00 pm Auditorium in Madison East, 600 Dulany Street, Alexandria, Virginia. The Biotechnology and Chemical Pharmaceutical Customer Partnership is designed and developed to be a forum to share […]

At today’s session of BIO’s IPCC Conference, Gregory Morse of the Central Reexamination Unit of the US Patent and Trademark Office gave a presentation of the process for handling re-exams.  Comparing ex parte and inter partes, Morse showed that the time for processing to first action is inching up although inter partes proceedings have not […]