It’s become an article of faith among those complaining that patent reform has gone too far that the 2006 eBay case must be overturned—but that assertion doesn't appear to be backed up by the facts.
Read more →This Saturday, September 15, 2017, marks the five-year anniversary of the first filing of an inter partes review. We’ve seen nearly 7,000 post-grant reviews filed since then, a Supreme Court…
Read more →Patent examiners have an extremely hard job. They’re given a patent application—which could be anywhere from a page long up to hundreds of pages, with patent claims ranging from a…
Read more →The cost of bad patents is not just the cost of lawsuits. This may seem obvious, but apparently it isn’t. I’ve recently noticed a trend from the anti-reform lobby:…
Read more →When standard-essential patents (SEPs) are in the news, it’s usually in the context of cellular or wireless networking standards. Maybe you’ve thought about how standards govern other things, ranging from audio-visual encoding standards like MP3 to threads on fire hydrants.
But what you probably don’t think about are voting machine standards.
In a decision issued last week, Judge Gilstrap—the “poster boy” for patent trolls’ favorite court, the Eastern District of Texas—has mangled the law on induced infringement, contributory infringement, and willfulness. The ruling in Motiva v. Sony & HTC contradicts case law and the logic of the statute, cites case law for a proposition it explicitly…
It’s become a bit of shibboleth among the folks who want to roll back the patent reforms of the past decade that patent trolls are a myth. Unfortunately, this week one of those mythical trolls is taking a very real swing at a little GNOME.
Patents are a useful tool in innovation policy—but they aren’t the only tool available. If all you ever see are patents (and patent lawyers), your natural reaction is to use patents to solve policy problems. It’s a normal human bias—the law of the instrument states that humans will reach for a familiar tool (i.e., patents)…
In today’s Curver v. Home Expressions decision, the Federal Circuit resolved several outstanding questions regarding design patents. In particular, the Federal Circuit rejected the notion that a design can be claimed, untethered from a specific article of manufacture to which it is applied. It also rejected the notion that the verbal portion of a design…
