Time to InventThe shock of the new

A lot turns on who invents a thing first. Billions maybe.

Patent law requires newness. The mandate can cause patent death even in the case of almost-but-not-quite “prior art”. If the older stuff “anticipates” the new thing, it renders the invention unpatentable.

A recent decision by the Federal Circuit highlights the anticipation question. 
Continue Reading In Patent Law, Weeks Count

IMG_0195Antitrust v. patent

The extraordinary risk in antitrust cases has prompted courts to erect ever-higher hurdles to them. Extending a trend that began decades before, the Supreme Court used a sprawling antitrust case — Bell Atl. Corp. v. Twombly (2007) — to toughen the test for pleading a claim. It warned about the high costs

Light BulbAnother patent just failed the Supreme Court's airy test for unpatentable "abstract ideas".

A whiter shade of pale

Patents that define ways to make money through commerce on the Internet never have gotten much respect.

In the last year, a series of rulings by the Federal Circuit and the Supreme Court bled much of the remaining color out of the "business

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Measuring patent damages — and excluding reexam evidence

The Federal Circuit again tightened the criteria for setting damages awards in patent infringement cases. But, in a bit of good news for infringement plaintiffs, it lent further support to the general inclination of district courts to exclude evidence of non-final results of patent reexaminations by the U.S. Patent

Idea lightbulb

Abstract ideas

Section 101 of the Patent Act allows patents on "any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof". 35 U.S.C. 101. But, the Supreme Court has held, it does not make laws of nature, natural phenomena, or abstract ideas patentable. Ass'n for Molecular Pathology

Shutterstock_127074176Broad patents

You could get really rich if you had a patent on something like "a device that can make and receive wireless phone calls". That would cover every wireless phone, dumb and smart, that ever existed. It would include the satchel phone that Blawgletter's friend Darrell Gest carried around in his ratty pickup back

Shutterstock_98079497Patents require definiteness

The U.S. Supreme Court has tightened the test for whether a patent "particularly point[s] out and distinctly claim[s] the subject matter which the applicant regards as [the] invention." 35 U.S.C. § 112, ¶ 2.

The Federal Circuit (which handles all appeals from district courts on patent matters) had interpreted the statute to