Downloads: 9

2009-07-28

A poorly drafted patent can have disastrous results.  It can serve to give away your most valuable secrets, cost millions in a doomed defense of it and even open the patent holder up to liability. 

Patents are deceptively complex legal instruments requiring great skill, practice and training to draft well.  Likewise, guiding the patent application through the examination process in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office -- what we call “prosecuting the application” -- is a very complicated procedure that also requires great skill and training to do well. 

Because of the intricacies, idiosyncrasies and often counter-intuitive nature of patent law, neither a layperson nor even an inexperienced patent lawyer can evaluate whether a patent application has been well-drafted or poorly-drafted or whether it has been well-prosecuted or poorly prosecuted.

Downloads: 10

2009-02-04

Thanks to the ever-growing problem of identity theft, businesses now have increased duties with respect to the disposal of “consumer information.” On December 4, 2003, the Fair and Accurate Credit Transaction Act (“FACTA”) became law. The law requires that any person that maintains or otherwise possesses consumer information for a business purpose, properly dispose of any such information. Before the law took practical effect, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) had to enact rules implementing the law.

Downloads: 12

2009-02-04

In the words of the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals (the appellate court reposed with authority over all patent cases): “It is not always clear where the boundary line between permissible repair and impermissible reconstruction lies: how much "repair" is fair before the device is deemed reconstructed.”1 In 1849, in the case of Wilson v. Simpson, the Supreme Court ruled that the replacement of cutting knives in a patented planing machine was permissible under the patent laws.2 Critical to the Court’s decision was the fact that the knives had an expected lifetime of 60—90 days, whereas the planing machine would last for years. From this fact the Court extrapolated that the inventor of the planing machine could not have intended for the machine to be used without replacement of the knives. The Court determined that replacement of worn out parts of a patented machine, though essential, was allowable, “not because they are of perishable materials, but because the inventor of the machine has so arranged them as part of its combination, that the machine could not be continued in use without a succession of knives at short intervals.”

Downloads: 14

2009-01-24