Getting innovation out of the lab at Xerox PARC

Fortune Magazine's Jon Fortt sat down with Chief Technology Officer Sophie Vandebroek to talk about how she manages the tough trade-offs in Xerox’s technology development –- building versus buying, managing risk and partnering up with other companies.
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Constitution? But we're patent lawyers!

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office may have a major problem on its hands — the possibly unconstitutional appointment of nearly two-thirds of its patent appeals judges.
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Patent's 'Inequitable Conduct Doctrine': Death Penalty for Minor Conduct?

The ‘inequitable conduct doctrine’ — which allows federal judges to void patents upon a finding that a company deceived the PTO to get the patent — has led to a heated battle in Congress, pitting brand-name pharma companies against generic drug-makers and consumer groups.
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The fibula and the safety pin

Walter Hunt patented the safety pin almost exactly 160 years ago.
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First Action Interview Pilot Program

The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is initiating a pilot program in which, in certain art areas, applicants who comply with the requirements set forth in this notice will receive the results of a prior art search conducted by the examiner, via a condensed Pre-Interview Communication, and then be permitted to conduct an interview with the examiner to discuss the cited prior art references, before the examiner issues an Office action on the merits that sets forth the rejections.
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Remember Invisible Ink? How About Vanishing Ink?

CNET reports that PARC (formerly Xerox Parc) the folks who have had a large hand in "laser printing, distributed computing and Ethernet, the graphical user interface (GUI), object-oriented programming, and ubiquitous computing" have invented vanishing ink.
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A unique brand of monopoly

A patent is a deal with the U.S. government. In exchange for elevating the knowledge of the public in general by publishing a description of an invention, the government gives, in return, a "monopoly." But the monopoly in the patent world is a different animal than what most would consider a true monopoly
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Growing the Eco-Patent Commons to Truly Promote Green Innovation

The idea of sharing green patents is admirable, but according to Nancy Edwards Cronin reforms are needed if the Eco-Patent Commons initiative is to prove successful. " The creative mind has the capability to develop both the ideas and processes to solve the innumerable environmental problems that threaten our planet, but only through invention-sharing initiatives like the Eco-Patent Commons can we hope to channel environmental innovation to make a lasting impact for future generations. However, the above improvements are needed if the Eco-Patent Commons hopes to have a truly meaningful impact in the green tech space," she says in an article first published at Greenbiz.com.
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China Celebrated World IP Day

China organized several activities to celebrate the Day including a competition on legal knowledge on hundreds of websites and the destruction of illegal audio-visual products. China’s concerted efforts to curb IPR violations have not gone unnoticed. California attorney Tom Chow has devoted a number of posts in his China Esquire Blog to defending China’s commendable IPR enforcement. In his April 18th article entitled “china’s ip efforts are laudable despite constant western criticism”, he reminds the reader that the number of IPR violations (illegal downloads) must be taken into account with the fact that China has over 1 billion people.
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Wallace Hume Carothers

April 27, 2008 is the 112th birth anniversary of one of the greatest inventors, who died sadly just two days after his 40th birthday. Wallace Hume Carothers was an American chemist, inventor and the leader of organic chemistry at DuPont, credited with the invention of Nylon. He was a group leader in DuPont’s Experimental Station laboratory, near Wilmington, Delaware, where most polymer research was done. Carothers was a brilliant organic chemist who, in addition to first developing nylon, also helped lay the groundwork for Neoprene. After receiving his Ph.D, he taught at several universities before he was hired by the DuPont Company to work on fundamental research. He married the former Helen Sweetman on February 21, 1936. Wallace Carothers had been troubled by periods of mental depression since his youth. Despite his success with Nylon, he felt that he had not accomplished much and had run out of ideas. His unhappiness was compounded by the death of his favorite sister, and on April 29, 1937, he checked into a Philadelphia hotel room and died after drinking a cocktail of lemon juice laced with potassium cyanide. His daughter, Jane, was born seven months later on November 27, 1937.
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World Intellectual Property Day 2008 - Celebrating Innovation

This year’s World Intellectual Property Day on April 26, 2008 focuses on celebrating innovation and promoting respect for intellectual property (IP). In his message to mark the eighth World IP Day, Dr. Kamil Idris, Director General of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), highlights the intrinsic link between creativity, innovation and IP. Dr. Idris pays tribute to inventors around the world who have driven technological advances and enriched our collective cultural heritage.
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Patent Office CIO to resign

David Freeland, who has been chief information officer at the Patent and Trademark Office since 2005, has announced his plans to leave the agency.
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Sun's Tim Bray on the Three Components of a Successful Blog

Debbie Weil just finished participating in Bulldog Reporter's Webinar: Corporate Blogging Update for PR. Fellow panelists were John Earnhardt of Cisco and Tim Bray of Sun Microsystems.
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Hong Kong Movie Star Jackie Chan Promoting IP Respect

The popular actor's image on a one hundred square meter billboard will speak to over 20 million people over a two week period spanning World Intellectual Property Day on April 26th. “Jackie Chan’s message to Beijing’s citizens is direct and simple – say NO! to piracy. By doing so, you are nurturing and protecting China’s movie industry which then will be free to reach out and tell compelling, exciting Chinese stories to people around the world” said Mike Ellis, President and Managing Director, Asia-Pacific, Motion Picture Association.
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Are Biotech Companies Stymied In Dealing With Universities?

Stephen Albainy-Jenei says, "As with most axioms, there is some truth to these assertions. But, as they say, there are always two sides to every story. Since I used to direct patents and licensing at a major university technology transfer office and now work in private practice helping biotech companies deal with universities, I have the unique distinction of having been on both sides of the fence. And, like many things in life, it’s always easy to criticize the other side."
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EU Community patent: machines to the rescue!

The IPKat looks forward to the new game of Community Patent Whispers. You take a claim, feed it into the translation machine for the first official language (taking them in alphabetical order); when you get the output, you feed it in for translation into the second, and vice versa. When the claim has been through each official language once, you put it before an EPO Board of Appeal and ask them to interpret it. Merpel says, my favourite term in European patent law is the phrase "as such". If you translate it from English to Dutch, Dutch to French, French to German and then German to English you get "ash look for".
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Trade Secrets & Patents Perfect Together -- IP Watchdog

"It is important to understand how patent and trade secret law overlap. It is worth noting that many people erroneously believe that when an inventor applies for a patent all trade secrets are lost. This is simply not true. Anyone who tells you this is either over simplifying the process or does not understand patent law," says Gene Quinn at IP Watchdog.
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Microsoft Social Networking Patent Application on Peer-to-Patent

Microsoft has a patent application posted on the Peer-to-Patent site for Recommending contacts in a social network.
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A Day in the Life of an IP Blog

This month’s issue of WIPO Magazine features an article about the daily blogging life of IPKat blogger Jeremy Phillips, named by Managing Intellectual Property Magazine in 2005 as one of the 50 most influential “people” in the IP world
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Earth Day

This year marks the 39th Earth Day, a day when people around the world come together to attend festivals, rallies, cleanups, tree plantings and other events focused on the environment. It's also a day for business, as more companies use Earth Day to highlight green products, roll out eco-friendly initiatives and spread information on green living.
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Blawg Review at Virtually Blind

This week's presentation of the best of the legal blogs gives readers a new perspective on law in and around new virtual worlds. Along the way, Ben Duranske, author of a new book on Virtual Law, explores this week’s important real world legal issues.
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'Youngest inventor' in England makes a clean sweep

Intellectual Property lawyers Freeth Cartwright in the UK Science City of Nottingham bring us news gleaned from the BBC that a five-year-old boy is thought to be the UK's youngest person to patent an idea after inventing a labour-saving broom to help his father sweep leaves.
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Growing the Eco-Patent Commons to Truly Promote Green Innovation

When the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) launched the Eco-Patent Commons, it appeared to be a win for the "green movement." IBM, Sony, Pitney-Bowes and Nokia are among the companies who have already donated patents to the initiative, doing their part to protect the environment by aiding and promoting innovation in this sector...However, the Eco-Patent Commons itself is in need of some innovation if it truly hopes to accomplish its goal: sharing useful environmental technologies for "the greater good."
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Patent trolls and patent-busters

Once upon a time, Abraham Lincoln famously said that the patent system was intended to secure "to the inventor, for a limited time, the exclusive use of his invention; and thereby added the fuel of interest to the fire of genius, in the discovery and production of new and useful things."
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University patent managers versus developing countries

On April 16, the Association of University Technology Mangers (AUTM) asked its members to "Sign the Institute for Policy Innovation's Open Letter to the World Health Organization. . . in advance of the WHO's Intergovernmental Working Group (IGWG) on Public Health, Innovation and Intellectual Property." According to the AUTM, "Prize systems, a medical R&D treaty, and compulsory patent pools are being advocated as alternatives to patents and IP protections at the April 28 meeting. These solutions could pose a challenge to our current and very successful system of innovation and tech transfer."
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Encyclopedia Britannica Now Free For Bloggers

You can purchase the 32 volume Britannica, which has 65,000 articles and 44 million words, for just $1,400. Or you can access it on the web for $70 per year. And now, you can get access to the online version for free through a new program called Britannica Webshare - provided that you are a “web publisher.” The definition of a web publisher is rather squishy: “This program is intended for people who publish with some regularity on the Internet, be they bloggers, webmasters, or writers. We reserve the right to deny participation to anyone who in our judgment doesn’t qualify.”
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The ROI of Trust: I'm Scared to Let Employees Blog

A blog is a tool. In this case, it’s a relative unknown, but is the blog the problem?
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A Eulogy For Patent Reform?

Everyone agreed that the U.S. patent system needs to be updated. But if it hadn't been for one sticking point, that update might have come this year. Now that high-level talks in the Senate Judiciary Committee have broken down, the opportunity for the patent system's first major overhaul in 50 years may have been lost -- at least for the current legislative session.
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China defends anti-piracy efforts

BEIJING (AP) — Officials defended China's efforts to stop rampant copying of movies and other goods, saying Thursday that 4,322 people were convicted of product piracy last year and promising special efforts to protect Olympics-related trademarks.
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China and Your IP Risk

The Manufacturing Industry Blog published by Xerox has an interesting post today by Lynette McTigue, who writes that, as manufacturers continue to make investments overseas and integrate a global supply chain, intellectual property theft will remain a common issue. She says, "The risks of intellectual property theft and counterfeiting have not stopped manufacturers from flocking to China in order to gain the benefits of the workforce and its low wages. As organizations continue to make these decisions, they will be forced to mitigate the IP theft risk."
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Oregon Claims Copyright in Its Statutes -- Well, Sort Of

Sam Bayard at the Citizen Media Law Project blogs, "Just last week, I was ruminating on the viability of state claims of copyright in government records. At the time, I was pretty confident that a state wouldn't be crazy enough to claim copyright in its own statutes, both because caselaw suggests this would be legally invalid and because it would be shoddy public policy. Now, the Legislative Counsel Committee of the State of Oregon has sent a cease-and-desist letter to Justia, a free online resource for judicial decisions and statutes, claiming that Justia's posting of the Oregon Revised Statutes violates its copyright. The Committee's claim is not as outlandish as it initially sounds, but it is still quite problematic."
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Monster Cable runs into Superhero Lawyer-turned-CEO

So, Monster Cable is known for making some...interesting claims with regard to how special their cables are (not always so special) and employs lawyers to send fancy letters to unsuspecting companies that make special cables, too. Generally, they claim that Company X has infringed upon one of their patents by making cables that might in some way look like Monster's but aren't the same, and hopes that the threat of litigation will compel a settlement, and a licensing agreement. This tends to work when the company on the receiving end is easily intimidated. Not this time.
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Welcome to Idea Week!

A Canadian-born project, started to celebrate creativity and explore how it can impact and promote innovation, is now an annual event. Today, April 15, Leonardo Da Vinci’s birthday, is when the party begins. Idea Week is seven days that are set aside to encourage creativity and enthusiasm for innovation in the arts, business, science and education sectors. It’s all concluded with Creativity and Innovation Day on April 21.
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Blogger Appreciation Day

Thanks for the link love!
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Preliminary Interviews with Patent Examiners?

In light of the new obviousness challenges with the Supreme Court's KSR decision, patent seekers may wish to take proactive steps to help the patent examiner understand the story of the invention and its nonobviousness of the prior art. In some cases, it may even make sense to request a preliminary interview with the examiner -- before the first office action has been issued -- in order to expedite examination and address the inevitable obviousness issues.
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USPTO launches new pilot

The United States Patent and Trademark Office is initiating a six-month pilot program that will allow an applicant to have an interview with the patent examiner prior to the first Office action on the merits in a new utility application. The First Action Interview Pilot program will expedite prosecution of the patent application by enhancing the interaction between the applicant and the examiner, providing the applicant an opportunity to resolve patentability issues one-on-one with the examiner at the beginning of the review process. The program will begin on April 28.
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Mostly Sunny

Sun Microsystems GC Mike Dillon says, "Despite the present economic environment, I can't think of a better area for future legal career opportunities than intellectual property law."
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Kanzius Machine: A Cancer Cure?

Inventor Tells 60 Minutes He Hopes To Live Long Enough To See Machine Cure Humans: John Kanzius hopes he can add a few more years to the six he has already cheated death out of since he was diagnosed with terminal leukemia. He wants to see the promising machine he invented that kills cancer cells go into clinical trials and maybe help other people beat a disease he probably won’t.
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The Effect of Social Missions On Tech Innovation

Steve Wozniak built the original Apple I to share with his friends at the Homebrew Computer Club, but it was his business partner Steve Jobs who had the insight that there might be a market for such a contraption. Indeed, for decades, Silicon Valley has been defined by the tension between the technologist’s urge to share information and the industrialist’s incentive to profit. Now a new style of “hybrid” technology organization is emerging that is trying to define a path between the nonprofit world and traditional for-profit ventures. [NYT via Slashdot]
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UK - New Free Patents Database

A new free searchable database for published patents was recently launched by the UK Intellectual Property Office (UK-IPO).
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The Case For And Against Software And Business Model Patents

For folks who read Techdirt and work in the software industry, I'm sure the basics won't come as much of a surprise. The arguments revolve around the fact that you're not supposed to be able to patent an idea -- and then making it clear that software and business models by themselves are really just ideas. They need to be tied to some sort of tangible technology to actually be considered patentable.
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IP Think Tank Global Week in Review - 11 April 2008

Duncan Bucknell presents a weekly review of the highlights of intellectual property law and policy from around the world.
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Patent Quality Reports Analyze Patents in Cases Decided by the Federal Circuit

Patent information provider PatentCafe introduced a new line of patent quality evaluation reports for United States patents in patent infringement litigation cases decided by the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) following the April 30, 2007, Supreme Court decision in KSR International Co. V. Teleflex Inc. (KSR). The new Patent Factor Index (PFi™) Reports, available for public downloading without cost, statistically score more than two dozen indicators of patent quality, many of the indices correlating directly to how the CAFC has decided on cases involving these patents.
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Konomark - A New Way to Be Friendly with Your Intellectual Property

As an experiment," says Eric E. Johnson, "I’ve come up with a symbol, a name, and some guidelines for a system to encourage people to communicate their willingness to share copyrighted works. The symbol I’ve drawn is inset. I have no formal training in illustration, but my two-year-old, Joe, immediately recognized it as a pineapple. The pineapple has been a traditional symbol of hospitality. And the name I’ve come up with is 'konomark.' The Hawaiian word 'kono' means to invite, prompt, or ask in."
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Stupiderest Patent Reform Provisions

After months of meetings and redrafting work, the U.S. Senate is said to be ready to make a move on the patent reform bill, S. 1145. Various senators are said to be working behind the scenes drafting amendments with some compromises being made on section 11 of the bill, a/k/a “Applicant Quality Submissions (AQS).” The Intellectual Property Owners Association (IPO) is urging everyone to contact their senators to get the section on AQS banished.
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Patents: To Accelerate or not to Accelerate?

"Why go through the trouble and expense of filing a software or business method patent, if the underlying solution is obsolete by the time the patent is issued?" asks Kas Kasravi on EDS' Next Big Thing Blog: Read and Respond to What the EDS Fellows Say About Technology.
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Write like a blogger

Seth Godin says, "You can improve your writing (your business writing, your ad writing, your thank you notes and your essays) if you start thinking like a blogger."
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Blawg Review #154

David Harlow is hosting Blawg Review #154 on World Health Day at HealthBlawg. The World Health Organization has announced that today's theme is protecting health from climate change.
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Stanford Launches On-Campus Venture Fund, SSE Ventures

Countless startups, such as Sun, Yahoo and Google (as well as newcomers like Meebo) were started at Stanford, or by Stanford graduates. Now Stanford wants to help its students by providing seed funding directly, and in the process will get a little equity in those new ideas, too.
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The Wizard of Menlo Park

It is important for aspiring inventors to always remember that while Thomas Edison was a brilliant inventor he was perhaps an even more brilliant businessman. Early on in his career he invented devices without considering whether there would be a market for his inventions. He soon became determined to never again invent without knowing there would be a market.
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Innovator's Dilemmas: invention vs. innovation?

Both words invention and innovation share the notion of novelty, meaning an expectation for something that is new. There are quite a few articles out there debating this subject. Some imply that an innovation is something which has been deployed and put into practice, while some other claim that only successful implementations qualify as true innovations. As you can already tell, some of the discussion is about semantics.
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Kodak Names Chief Blogger

Rochester, N.Y., Apr 03, 2008 (Business Wire) -- Eastman Kodak Company (NYSE:EK) today announced that it has named Jennifer Cisney as the company's first Chief Blogger. Cisney will provide daily oversight and creative guidance for Kodak's two blogs - "A Thousand Words" and "A Thousand Nerds" - and will boost the company's social media presence. In addition, Cisney will serve as the company's eyes and ears online, listening to customer feedback and sharing ideas and tips related to Kodak's products and services.
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Challenging Patent Validity: Microsoft Asks Supreme Court to Reduce "Clear and Convincing" Standard

Dennis Crouch at Patently-O says, "A weak point of Microsoft’s petition is that its claim for invalidity falls under 102(g). Microsoft is arguing that its own non-published prior invention should invalidate the z4 patent." Comments ensue.
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Blogging opens doors to write and speak more

Legal marketing expert, Tom Kane, encourages lawyers who want to become an authority in their niche to write and speak more often.
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Second Life ... IBM gets serious

IBM and Linden Lab, creator of Second Life, have entered into an alliance "to create an enterprise-class version of Second Life behind a corporate firewall." According to the IBM website: "IBM is helping clients and partners to conduct business inside virtual worlds and to connect the virtual world with the real world through a richer, more immersive Web environment." So was this recent television commercial by IBM making fun of Second Life as a business tool? Or just the way some people use Second Life?
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Is an unsecured FTP server publicly accessible?

When a company finds itself in court defending against a patent lawsuit, it will usually assert two major defenses. First, the company will say "I don't practice (or produce) what is claimed in this patent." Second, a defendant in a patent lawsuit will also attempt to "invalidate" the claims of the patent by showing that "prior art" described the claims in the patent prior to the application date of the patent. While this defense can take multiple forms (see, for example, 35 U.S.C. § 102 ), a defendant must often show that the prior art relied upon was in fact publicly known or publicly used. So now its time for a pop quiz--which one of three options would you consider not being "publicly accessible" for the purposes of United States patent law?
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Coalition for Patent Fairness Thinks Patent Reform Is Near

The Coalition for Patent Fairness is made up of high-tech companies pushing for patent reform. While the last comprehensive patent law reform by Congress was last major revision of the patent laws was the Patent Act of 1952, P.L. 82-593, there is intense lobbying urging that the U.S. patent system is broken and needs to be fixed...Mark Chandler, General Counsel of Cisco, Mike Holston, General Counsel of HP and Time Warner chief patent counsel Chuck Fish answered questions on the perennial reform bill. They presented the bill as having consensus on most items with four remaining issues of serious contention.
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Patent Lawyers Do the Boogie as Court Shoots Down PTO Rules

The patent crowd is an excitable bunch. Whenever a big ruling is handed down, the Law Blog typically receives a few helpful e-mails from lawyers in that practice area giving us their thoughts. But this morning, we were flooded with notes from patent lawyers who could barely contain their glee over a Virginia district court’s ruling in Tafas v. Dudas.
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No Joke, Court Smacks Down New Patent Rules

Dr. Tafas, an inventor on more than seventeen patents pending and on eight U.S. issued patents as well as a co-founder at Ikonisys, complained that the USPTO exceeded its Congressionally-delegated rulemaking authority and that the new rule changes specifically violate Section 120, 132, and 365 of the Patent Act. He was joined by SmithKline Beecham Corporation (d/b/a GlaxoSmithKline). Together, GSK and Tafas claim that the Final Rules, which change the patent system by modifying several long-established rules governing patent examination by the USPTO, are unlawful agency action under Section 706(2) of the Administrative Procedure Act (APA)
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USPTO Continuation Ruled Dead (For Now)

Peter Zura says, "Expect the PTO to hit Congress hard on S.1145 to give it statutory authority - such a provision would effectively override the district court's ruling."
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Overcoming Inventoritis: The Silent Killer of Innovation

IndustryWeek posed a few questions to Peter P. Roosen and Tatsuya Nakagawa, authors of Overcoming Inventoritis: The Silent Killer of Innovation...Q: What are some ways companies can overcome Inventoritis? (Note: In the book there are 12 Ways to Overcome Inventoritis)
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Do any other GCs have this issue?

Sun Microsystems GC Mike Dillon's job is really different.
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Piracy = Terrorism (???)

Professor Marc Randazza says, "I have argued that Piracy might actually contribute to cultural enrichment...Nevertheless, I am willing to have my position challenged. I’m friendly to those who claim that piracy is wrong, evil, stealing, nasty, brutish, etc… And no two ways about it, piracy is illegal. I am 100% willing to lose the argument that piracy is a social good. Nevertheless, all I can say to those who want to use the terrorism boogieman in this debate is summed up right here."
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April Fool's Blawg Review

The practice of law does not take place in a vacuum, but in a vast and multifarious Real World full of fellow human beings and of social, economic, political, natural, and cultural tidal forces, and the practice can only gain from the attorney's engagement with that larger context. Also, writing about All That Other Stuff is frequently just more fun than writing about the law. So, while there is undoubtedly ample room for additional well-written law blogs, there is even more room in this world for well-written, lively non-law blogs from well-rounded, lively lawyers. Heed the call!
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