The biggest problem is identifying useful prior art in books in the first place. Since they're not in electronic form, there's obviously no way to perform an automated search on them. An examiner has to first have a strong suspicion that there's something useful in a particular book before they're going to seek it out. Usually this happens when the book has been cited in other relevant prior art.

Click on the link above to see this week's selection of top intellectual property news breaking in the blogosphere and on the internet.

Click on the link above to check out IP Think Tank’s weekly selection of top Pharma & Biotech intellectual property news breaking in the blogosphere and internet.

"All of the content in the IPLB print edition will now be available online: free and freely linkable," says Joe Mullin on his blog, The Prior Art.

Twitter (or something like it) will define almost every live, public interaction we have in business in the near future. In some businesses, this is already happening," writes Jeffrey Blackwell at Trade Show Feed.

In a conference on March 24, CNSI launched a “technology incubator” – the first of its kind for UC – in conjunction with UCLA’s Office of Intellectual Property and Industry Sponsored Research (OIP-ISR). The event, held in the CNSI auditorium, brought together faculty entrepreneurs, representatives of industry startups and venture capital firms.

Pattie Maes & Pranav Mistry unveiling the "Sixth Sense". It's a wearable device with a projector that paves the way for profound interaction with our environment. Imagine "Minority Report" and then some.

Gartner released a report today that highlights the different ways that companies are adopting Twitter for business use.

Several new e-readers, including Amazon's Kindle and Sony's eReader, use electronic-paper technology that is easier to read than conventional displays. But e-paper still suffers in comparison to conventional liquid crystal displays in terms of refresh speed and vividness of color. Electronics manufacturer Fujitsu says it is shipping an LCD-based electronic reader called FLEPia in Japan next month that displays vivid color, a first in the industry... Fujitsu opted to use a technology it licensed in 2005 from a company called Kent Displays. The technology, branded Reflex LCD, looks and acts significantly different from most LCDs, explains Asad Khan, vice president of technology at Kent. Like E Ink's e-paper, it reflects ambient light instead of shining a light from within. "It's dramatically different from traditional LCDs," says Khan. "It's really stripped down to its bare essentials." This means that the Reflex LCD display doesn't use a power-hungry backlight, and it doesn't have the series of optical layers that most LCDs have.

The public sector including universities and research councils are crucial sources of innovation and national economic development. The Bayh Dole Act in the USA has undoubtedly facilitated and catalytically incentivized the translation of research into essential goods and services, and elsewhere similar legislative instruments and/or university policy and practice modeled along Bayh Dole is likely to have major transformative effects on local economies. While largely beneficial, in some cases this may come at a cost.

Click on the link above to see this week's selection of top intellectual property news breaking in the blogosphere and on the internet.

Click on the link above to check out IP Think Tank’s weekly selection of top Pharma & Biotech intellectual property news breaking in the blogosphere and internet.

One of the more interesting of these is an effort conceived at New York Law School by Beth Noveck, a professor there and director of the Institute for Information Law & Policy. This effort, called Peer-to-Patent is run in cooperation with the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO). Its target is a system that, if not broken, is certainly buckling under the strain of growing demand and limited resources — the global patent system.

USPTO announced that it once again seeking nominations for potential recipients of the National Medal of Technology and Innovation (NMTI), presented by the President of the United States each year to select individuals for their technological achievements.

The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has announced the opening of the National Inventors Hall of Fame in the museum of its Alexandria, Va., campus. The Hall of Fame honors and encourages the men and women responsible for the great technological advances that make human, social and economic progress possible. The Hall of Fame opening is being celebrated with a new exhibit about the inductees, “Inventive Links.”

"I wonder what the Copyright experts are going to say about this one. Obviously, if Kutiman has gotten permission from all of the various owners of these YouTube videos, there's no problem. Based on the description quoted by the JPost, I'm betting that's not the case—Which could open up some really interesting new questions headaches for fair use mavens everywhere." - Brian C. Ledbetter

Many critics of Red Hat's approach generally argue that defensive patents are undesirable because they impose encumbrances on technology and serve to validate the system. Another point that is often is raised is that defensive patents are largely useless for protecting against litigation from patent-holding companies that don't have any reason to need cross-licensing agreements. Instead of filing for patents on certain technologies in order prevent others from doing so, critics say, open source software companies should simply document and publish all of their innovations so that the material can be used as prior art to block future patent litigation.

Red Hat's application for a patent for an approach to routing messages over a middleware bus has disturbed some who are wondering why Red Hat didn't simply publish. If, as Red Hat claim, this is simply a defensive patent they could instead have published the proposal to establish prior art.

Things which are different in order simply to be different are seldom better, but that which is made to be better is almost always different ” Dieter Rams (1993)

While the patent conversation on Twitter is growing (both in quantity and substance), it certainly could use a little help. To that end, I thought it would be great to recruit the Patent and Trademark Office into the mix. The Office is doing some wonderful things with technology and community involvement (the webcast of the recent roundtable discussion on deferred examination is a prime example), but has yet to undertake any social/new media efforts. Twitter seems like a logical way for the Office to get started in this arena. At a minimum, the Office could use Twitter to post news items and links from its news page. This simple use of the system would provide another avenue to distribute critical information to Office stakeholders. There’s so much more that could be done, though.

Click on the link above to see this week's selection of top intellectual property news breaking in the blogosphere and on the internet.

Click on the link above to check out IP Think Tank’s weekly selection of top Pharma & Biotech intellectual property news breaking in the blogosphere and internet.

The judge, Mr Justice Floyd, said: "Dr Kelly directed the project to a successful conclusion on a modest research spend and under considerable pressure to produce results. Dr Chiu made monumental efforts in how own sphere of responsibility." Law firm McDermott Wills & Amery said: "This case is highly significant as it is the first time that the UK courts have awarded compensation to employee inventors under this law, even though it has been in force since 1977.

InnovationQ - Patent Management Tool -- IP.com has introduced new intellectual property management software (InnovationQ). The InnovationQ 3.2 features a new graphical user interface plus two new modules. In addition, several new features are incorporated into this release.

Joe Mullin, a reporter at IP Law & Business, looks at the issue of copying and other popular misconceptions about patent lawsuits in his January IPLB story, "The Inventor's Tale." The story has now been published on Law.com as well, with a different title: "How Juror Misconceptions Affect Patent Trials." At the link above, he follows up with a post on his blog, The Prior Art.

Click on the link above to see this week's selection of top intellectual property news breaking in the blogosphere and on the internet.

Click on the link above to check out IP Think Tank’s weekly selection of top Pharma & Biotech intellectual property news breaking in the blogosphere and internet.

In a nutshell, the Patent Reform Act of 2009 Senate Bill provides for the following: Sec. 2. Right of the first inventor to file -- This section converts the United States’ patent system into a first-inventor-to-file system, giving priority to the earlier-filed application for a claimed invention. Interference proceedings are replaced with a derivation proceeding to determine whether the applicant of an earlier-filed application was not the proper applicant for the claimed invention – such a proceeding will be faster and less expensive than were interference proceedings. This section also encourages the sharing of information by providing a grace period for publicly disclosing the subject matter of the claimed invention, without losing priority. (Click on the link above for other sections summarized at Patent Baristas.)

Sometimes companies leave the patenting to the R&D department, figuring that they know their inventions better than anyone in management would. The problem is that R&D may not know or always be cognizant of the overall goals and strategy of the business the way management is. And what sometimes happens when the R&D department takes over the patenting process is that they lose sight of the truly important aspects of the inventions, leading to patents that cover products, and not innovations.