To my wonderful readers:
I am going to be moving on from my terrific post as patent librarian at SFPL, and so this blog is going to have to be shuttered. Perhaps the next patent librarian will pick up the torch, so check in at http://www.sfpl.org/.
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| Photo courtesy of PA Attorney General's Office Website. http://www.attorneygeneral.gov/press.aspx?id=3313 |
UCLA law professor Doug Lichtman wrote an op-ed in the New York Times today about a patent case that is soon to be considered by the Supreme Court.
At issue, in both the case and the article, is the question of whether a juries in patent lawsuits should be discouraged from questioning the validity of a patent, as they currently are. This practice stems from the assumption that patent examiners, who are experts, are more likely to make a correct assessment of an invention's validity than are a group of lay jurors.
Lichtman argues that allowing juries to consider the validity of a patent would do no harm. The examiner's opinion will, after all, be submitted as evidence. And by allowing juries to take into account the possibility that a patent is invalid, we can make up for the inevitable innacuracies that accompany the enormous job of examining the hundreds of thousands of patent applications that are filed each year.
Lichtman does a great job of summing up the task that the USPTO faces. Check out the excerpt below and then have a look at the whole story here. (I think since it's a referral it doesn't count towards your monthly quota.)
A patent’s validity is first judged at the United States Patent and Trademark Office, where thousands of experts on everything from business practices to stereo equipment toil to evaluate every submitted application. It’s a herculean task: inventors have filed more than 450,000 applications every year since 2007; last year the number was close to 500,000. To accurately evaluate all of those purported inventions would cost tens of billions of dollars, multiples more than what the Patent Office receives in federal outlays or could plausibly raise on its own with application fees.
As a result, patent examiners give most applications only a quick look, spending on average 16 hours to 17 hours per application — nowhere near the time needed to assess whether an invention is truly new and not obvious. Worse, those hours are typically spread over two to three years, and they are interspersed with work on hundreds of other open files.
There's a great little piece in the NY Times Diner's Journal blog about a chocolate shop owner in NYC who was recently denied permission to call his shop Chocolate Library because the name might confuse consumers.
For the record, the name-denial came from NY state authorities, not the PTO, but it's still a good lesson about the importance of reading up on the legal ins and outs of naming a business.
First it was Shepard Fairey, then Jeff Koons, and now, according to the Art Newspaper, LA artist Thierry Guetta, aka Mr. Brainwash, is the latest popular artist to be involved in a copyright kerfuffle.
Mr. Brainwash is being sued for basing a work from his 2008 show "Life is Beautiful" on a popular photo of Run DMC.
I wonder if art schools are adding IP classes to their curricula?
There's a great article from yesterday's NY Times noting the impending expiration this year of Pfizer's Lipitor and several other "blockbuster" drugs.
The long and short of it is that drug companies are finding that their traditional business model, which is to spend millions of dollars developing patentable drugs, then making the money back (plus a healthy profit!) from the proceeds of their patent monopoly, is failing them as governments and consumers push for cheaper drugs.
It's a tough question! This is one of those tricky areas where ethics and economics can appear to clash. Should we rely on private drug companies to develop medicines? If so, should we seek to restrict the cost of the medicines they develop? If not, who will step in to pay for R&D for the next generation of drugs?
TechDirt ran a piece this week about alleged "trademark bullying" by a family who registered "urban homesteading" as a federal trademark.
The story raises an interesting question -- how should the USPTO handle phrases that are in common usage, even if they aren't registered? I once attended a talk by a trademark examining attorney, and she described the process that they used to allow or reject trademark applications. I remember that she was very emphatic about the scope of their examination, that they only compared the application to their trademark registers and not to state trademark registers or common law trademark sources such as directories and product catalogs.
Anyhow, the point of that digression is to speculate that perhaps the dispute here -- that "urban homesteading" is indeed a common term and should not be allowed as a trademark -- is probably a prelude to a court case that will eventually make the final determination. Just speculating; it will be interesting to see what happens.
The USPTO's Patent Technology Monitoring Team has posted calendar year statistics up through 2009. These reports offer a glimpse into the USPTO's activities and, by extension, to technological advancements and the economy in general. Have a look!
I posted a link a week ago about popular artist Jeff Koons' threat to sue a local shop for selling bookends that look like balloon animals.
The Chronicle dug a little deeper and talked to the shop owner. It's an interesting story. Apparently the clown community in San Francisco is rallying around this guy.
Attention inventors, small business owners, large business owners, technology enthusiasts, and library users of all stripes:
USPTO Director David Kappos wants your input about how you currently use the Patent and Trademark Depository Library network and what direction you would like to see the PTDL take in the future.
The Director's Roundtable will take place on February 15 at 10:30am (PST). And don't worry, you don't have to leave this wonderful spring-like weather to attend; a webcast of the event will be available at this address:
https://uspto.connectsolutions.com/ptdlp021511/.
Look for full details in the February 8 Federal Register, and start thinking about what you'd like to get out of the PTDL program in the future!
Celebrity artist Jeff Koons is involved in a copyright lawsuit, which is not unusual for an artist who regularly appropriates images from popular culture for his artwork.
What is unusual this time is that Koons is a plaintiff, suing San Francisco gallery/gift shop Park Life for selling balloon animal book ends.
Koons claims that the bookends violate his copyright for his famous Balloon Dog sculpture, a ten-foot-tall rendition of balloon animals familiar to most people who have seen a clown perform at a birthday party.
There was an interesting article at Slate this week about IBM's patent application for a patent management system. The system, which would manage IBMs intellectual property portfolio, speaks to the enormous importance of intellectual property to a large corporation and to the increasing complexity of managing IP.
I am gradually catching up on my reading here, and I caught this interesting post from Jill Hurst-Wahl's Digitization 101 blog about works entering the public domain on January 1st, the day that copyright protection expires for, this year, works of authors who died in 1940, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Marcus Garvey, and Emma Goldman!
The post also points towards a tantalizing page from Duke's Center for the Study of Public Domain, showing what works would have passed into the public domain had Congress not extended copyright terms in the controversial 1978 Copyright Act, including Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (not this edition, but the original play), Horton Hears a Who!, and the movie On the Waterfront.
If the winter weather (or anything else) is getting you down, have a look at this great invention.
This is part of a great series from Aardman Animation called "Cracking Contraptions," featuring exquisite Rube Goldberg-esque inventions courtesy of window-washer/amateur inventor/cheese enthusiast Wallace and his companion Gromit.
I came across this while looking for this clip that I remembered from Aardman's 1989 feature "The Wrong Trousers," which I was reminded of when I noticed a sale on Wensleydale cheese at my local market. Wensleydale is, of course, Wallace's favorite cheese.
SF Eats indeed!
