Patent & IP news for September 17, 2009

District Court's Summary Judgment Opinion Found to be Inconsistent With Its Own Claim Construction from www.grayonclaims.com

Vita-Mix Corp. v. Basic Holding, Inc. (Fed. Cir. Sept. 16, 2009)

In this case, the district court (Northern District of Ohio) granted summary judgment of no direct infringement, no inducement of infringement, no contributory infringement ...

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Rick Frenkel takes the stand in Troll Tracker defamation lawsuit from thepriorart.typepad.com

Former patent blogger Rick Frenkel took the stand in the federal courthouse in Tyler, Texas, on Wednesday, and apologized for referring to the Eastern District of Texas as a "Banana Republic" in a post he ...

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A weighty trade mark issue for the US courts from ipkitten.blogspot.com


The IPKat has learned from Reuters that Weight Watchers is suing Nestle for trade mark infringement in the District Court of Southern New York. Weight Watchers claims that Nestle has displayed trade marks relating to ...

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Kappos: Earn Accelerated Examination Rights by Abandoning Worthless Applications from www.patentlyo.com

One portion of my prior post on PTO Director Kappos' speech at the IPO annual meeting seems to have created some confusion. In particular, many questioned how Kappos planned to implement a system of "easing ...

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Federal Circuit Reverses Invalidity of Method of Calibrating Drug Dosages from inventivestep.net

Yesterday, in Prometheus Labs., Inc. v. Mayo Collaborative Services, the Federal Circuit reversed a district court determination that method claims directed to methods for calibrating the proper dosage of thiopurine drugs by measurement of two ...

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EDTX Addresses Transfer of Venue in Multi-Defendant Case -- Motion Granted as to California Defendants, Denied as to Texas Defendants from docketreport.blogspot.com

The court granted defendants' motion to transfer venue for convenience as to the moving defendants. "[Plaintiff's] website identifies its headquarters and only 'location' as San Francisco. . . . The NDCA is also where a majority of ...

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Fed. Cir.: Section 121 "Safe Harbor" Provision Does Not Apply to Continuations from 271patent.blogspot.com

Amgen, Inc. v. F. Hoffman-La Roche, Ltd., No. 09-1020 (Sept. 15, 2009)

Amgen prosecuted a series of patent applications relating to the production of the protein erythropoietin ("EPO") using recombinant DNA technology. All of the ...

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Superhydrophobicity from ipbiz.blogspot.com

One IPBiz reader was interested in the topic of superhydrophobicity, a property defined in terms of surfaces with a water contact angle above 150° and which materials are the subject of great interest for their ...

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Advice on the "background" section of a patent application from ipbiz.blogspot.com

from the 12:01Tuesday blog:

If you are going to have a "Background" section, try to keep it SHORTER than the rest of the specification. Remember that the Background is the one section that is ...

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Legal issues in proxy marriages from ipbiz.blogspot.com

An AP story titled Proxy wedding means Marine's widow, baby unwelcome on the case of Hotaru Ferschke presents issues of conflicting law in the matter of Hotaru's marriage to the now-deceased Sgt. Michael ...

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A coming Sikahema on patent oppositions: good news and bad news from ipbiz.blogspot.com

In a post titled Tech cos. protest patent reform in letter to Locke in the Microsoft Blog at SeattlePI, one has the text

Lawrence Ebert, of the Center for the Study of Digital Property, explains ...

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Professor Gets 4 Years In Prison For Exporting Technical Information on UAVs from www.patentbaristas.com

University of Tennessee (UT) Professor John Reece Roth, 72, of Knoxville, Tennessee, was sentenced to 48 months in prison for violating the Arms Export Control Act by conspiring to illegally export, and actually exporting, technical ...

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France: Domain-Name Registrars Exempt From Trademark Liability from www.ip-watch.org

A French court recently decided to exclude domain name registrars from liability for trademark infringing domain names registered by their customers in a case involving 13 large French companies against Luxembourg domain name registrar EuroDNS ...

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Rob Clarke Named New USPTO Chief of Staff from www.ipwatchdog.com

Yet another high profile senior level management position has been filed at the United States Patent and Trademark Office, and the trend of qualified “get it” people continues. Rob Clarke, who is currently the Director ...

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A Break From SpicyIP from spicyipindia.blogspot.com

For reasons, both personal and professional, I've decided to take a break from SpicyIP and from mainstream IP for a while. The break is rather indefinite at this stage. But please be assured that ...

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Q2 2009 Sees Record No. of U.S. Green Patents; EPO and UN Study Green Patent Licensing from greenpatentblog.com

There’s some catching up to do on green patent developments. First, the 2009 second quarter report of the Heslin Rothenberg firm’s Clean Energy Patent Growth Index (CEPGI) came out last month. CEPGI tracks ...

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