As Patent Progress reported in this post, Friday afternoon President Obama came out strong against patent trolls, saying, They’re just trying to essentially leverage and hijack somebody else’s idea and see if they can extort some money out of them. Unfortunately, some patent troll defenders responded with a personal attack on the President as doing…
The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is holding the first of its bicoastal roundtables on software patent quality today at 12 pm EST (9 am PST) in Palo Alto, CA. The second will be on February 27th in New York City at 9 am EST. A copy of the agenda and list of…
In an interesting historical tidbit, last week the Guardian in the United Kingdom published an interview of Martin Goetz. Goetz is the person awarded the first software patent back in 1968. In a prescient bit of headline writing, Computerworld had the following headline on its grant: In the Guardian piece, Goetz comes out hard against…
The patent arms race continues to expand. In 2012, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) saw a record 253,155 new patents issued. Not only that, it also just set a record on January 8, 2013 when 5,633 utility patents were granted in one day. At its current pace, the USPTO will come close to…
In December, Judge Koh denied Apple’s permanent injunction demands. The ruling sent Florian Mueller into fits over the state of injunction law in the United States. However, as Dennis Crouch at Patently-O opined, in a post-eBay world Judge Koh’s decision was perfectly sensible: a patentee should not obtain a permanent injunction without a clear showing of both…
During last week’s Department of Justice/Federal Trade Commission workshop on Patent Assertion Entities (PAEs), one of the panelists was Peter Detkin. Detkin is a founder of Intellectual Ventures, one of the PAEs we have been critical of on Patent Progress. In the run up to the workshop, Detkin authored a blog post attempting to issue…
On Monday, Patent Progress will be out in full force at the joint public workshop on patent assertion entity (PAE) behavior organized by the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). They have put together an excellent series of panels, and we will be live-tweeting the workshop…
In a round of good news, the USPTO has published a notice that it will be holding a roundtable on January 11, 2013 to look into regulations to “require greater public transparency concerning the ownership of patent applications and patents.” The deadline for requesting to participate in the roundtable is December 21, 2012, and the deadline…
Moments ago the United States Supreme Court granted certiorari in Assoc. for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, Inc., et al. (Supreme Court docket 12-398) The Court limited its grant to Question 1 presented in the petition: “are human genes patentable?” The Court did not grant certiorari as to Question 2 presented in the petition: “Did the court of appeals err in…
Numerous outlets reported Monday that the current head of the Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), David Kappos, would be stepping down. While we have disagreed with Kappos at Patent Progress, especially over his positions on software patents in his recent speech at the Center for American Progress, Kappos has moved the USPTO in the right…
