Patent Law Weblog
recent posts
- Why the Alice Test is Stupid, Part IV: The Usefulness Paradox
- Teva Capitulates to Federal Trade Commission Coercion
- USPTO Issues Memoranda on Subject Matter Eligibility
- USPTO Revokes Guidance on AI-Assisted Inventorship, But Rules Remain Basically the Same
- Why the Alice Test is Stupid, Part III: Eligible Independent Claims Can Have Ineligible Dependent Claims
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Category: Media Commentary
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By Kevin E. Noonan — Demagogy is never pretty. When coupled with a species-threatening pandemic, the propensity for the pundit class is to be susceptible to solutions that sound reasonable only to the uninformed. To make matters worse, some of those "solutions" are proposed by actors creative in using the crisis to advocate positions that…
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By Kevin E. Noonan – Yesterday, the Financial Times (London) published an article by Rana Foroohar entitled "Big Tech vs. Big Pharma: the battle over US patent protection." If the article can be encapsulated in a word, that word would be "debunked" for what the article calls the "patent troll narrative" that patent trolls are impeding…
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By Michael Borella — The textbook policy rationale for the existence of a patent system is a quid-pro-quo — a tradeoff in which an inventor is granted a time-limited property right over his or her invention in return for disclosing it to the public. Such disclosure is expected to, over time, spur further innovation, and bolster…
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By Kevin E. Noonan — The New York Times in a recent video (see "'Could You Patent the Sun?'") has returned to its theme against patenting, particularly with regard to patents for life-saving drugs. This time the paper invokes the meme of Jonas Salk and his response to a question during an interview by Edward…
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By Kevin E. Noonan — Admittedly, only on its Op-Ed page. But last Saturday Joe Nocera wrote a remarkably sane and reasoned column, entitled "The Patent Troll Smokescreen," pointing out that "big companies with large lobbying budgets" are using the patent troll meme to change patent law in their favor (but in ways that will…
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By Donald Zuhn — After reflecting upon the events of the past twelve months, Patent Docs presents its eighth annual list of top patent stories. For 2014, we identified eighteen stories that were covered on Patent Docs last year that we believe had (or are likely to have) the greatest impact on patent practitioners and…
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By Michael Borella and Andrew Williams — The press has been all too eager to decry the so-called "broken" U.S. patent system and the alleged "scourge" of non-practicing entities (NPEs). However, few if any articles attempt to provide an even-handed analysis of these issues. Recently, Jon Potter and Julie Samuels published a piece in Roll…
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By Kevin E. Noonan — In an article in The Cancer Letter entitled "Robert Cook-Deegan's Viewers' Guide To the Super Bowl of Gene Patent Cases," Professor Robert Cook-Deegan (at right) of the Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy and Sanford School of Public Policy, Duke University provides his colleagues in the medical arts with an…
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By Michael Borella — On March 28, Professor Robin Feldman of the University of California Hastings College of Law wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times entitled "Slowing the Patent Trolls". Unfortunately, like so many articles of its ilk, Professor Feldman's offering uses misleading hypotheticals and unsupported assertions to allege that the mere…
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By Michael Borella and Andrew Williams — On March 8th, The Economist published an article deriding both so-called "patent trolls" and "software patents" as being impediments to innovation in the United States. Unfortunately, as we have seen all too often when the mainstream media discusses the patent system, the article contains unsupported assertions, draws questionable…
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