Patent - Page 16
This is FindLaw's collection of Patent articles, part of the Intellectual Property section of the Corporate Counsel Center. Law articles in this archive are predominantly written by lawyers for a professional audience seeking business solutions to legal issues. Start your free research with FindLaw.
Intellectual Property
Patent Articles
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Findlaw interview with Philip Albert of Townsend and Townsend and Crew LLP. -
Patents form the foundation of most biotechnology companies and are crucial for their economic growth and advancement. However, an up-and-coming company may well come across competitors' patents that could block its future progress. Such blocking patents can cover the exact technology sought to be marketed by the company, or merely block an important subset of its activities. Either way, such patents can cause tremendous problems for a young biotech company at a time when it does not have much money, and additional financing is hard to come by. -
The drafter of a cease-and-desist letter must carefully craft the language in the letter to put the recipient on actual notice of patent infringement without giving the recipient a "reasonable apprehension" of litigation. -
Many people are aware of the need to keep patentable inventions secret. However, few people other than patent lawyers understand the reasons for the secrecy or are familiar with all of the actions that can cause an inventor to unintentionally lose the right to obtain a patent. As a result, some inventors unknowingly engage in behaviors that impair their patent rights. -
On remand from the Supreme Court, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit recently revisited the issue as to whether prosecution history estoppel barred a patent owner from relying on the doctrine of equivalents in a patent infringement suit. In this highly anticipated decision, Festo Corp. v. Shoketsu Kinzoku Kogyo Kabushiki Co., Ltd., the court concluded that the doctrine of equivalents might still be available to the patentee and remanded the case to the district court to make the determination. In reaching this conclusion, the Federal Circuit addressed whether any of three mechanisms for rebutting the presumption that prosecution history estoppel applies were available to the plaintiff and determined that one of them ‚ – unforeseeability ‚ – might be. -
The publication of patent applications by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) provides a means of following new developments in a field of interest. One such field of interest is nanotechnology, and reviewing some of the published applications in this field gives some insight into opportunities for further exploration and future patent protection. -
In a continuing drama concerning the rights of inventors to protect their creations by employing the doctrine of equivalents, the Federal Circuit applied the flexible standard mandated by the U. S. Supreme Court last year. This is our first opportunity to see the application of the Supreme Court's newly created rebuttal criteria governing how patent holders can use the doctrine of equivalents as a method of finding patent infringement.