Many companies build an IP portfolio around particular products, and the portfolio evolves over time as new refinements and improvements to the original concept are developed. This sometimes raises the question of whether various different inventions should be consolidated into a single
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The process of examining U.S. patent application is ex parte and does not involve third parties. The examination is based on the prior art that the applicant submits to the Patent Office and the prior art that the examiner uncovers in his
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We have had the pleasure of working with some inventors who have enjoyed huge success by developing cutting-edge medical devices. This is an area that many people want to break into because it can be very profitable. However, the medical device
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In KSR v. Teleflex, the Supreme Court described numerous reasons for combining or modifying prior art references in an obviousness analysis. The Court also made clear that these reasons need not be explicitly set forth in the prior art references themselves. In
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Once a USPTO examiner issues a “final” rejection against your patent application, your options become limited. They include 1) filing a Notice of Appeal to the Board of Patent Appeals & Interferences, 2) filing a Request for Continued Examination (“RCE”), 3) abandoning
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The law of inventorship is not too difficult to state but can be very difficult to apply in practice. In general, only those individuals who contributed to the conception of the claimed invention in a patent should be named as inventors.
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So, you hired a brilliant engineer to design a new medical device for your company. He used your computers, your staff, your vendors, your testing equipment, and developed it on “company time.” He received the salary that was agreed-upon for his efforts.
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On April 3 Facebook answered Yahoo’s patent infringement complaint in the pending lawsuit in the Northern District of California. As many people predicted, Facebook also alleged patent infringement claims against Yahoo based on 10 of Facebook’s patents. We discussed Yahoo’s patents and
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As a follow-up to our original post on the Prometheus case, we did a search to see if there were other patents related to the ones struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court, i.e., U.S. Patent No. 6,355,623 and 6,680,302. These patents
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If your business is based on patented diagnostic test methods, you may want to pay attention today’s U.S. Supreme Court opinion in Mayo Collaborative Services v. Prometheus Laboratories, Inc. In this case, the Court unanimously reversed the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals
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