A patent for an invention is the grant of a property right to the inventor, issued by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Generally, the term of a new patent is 20 years from the date on which the application for the patent was filed in the United States or, in special cases, from the date an earlier related application was filed, subject to the payment of maintenance fees. 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.
Patent
Patent Articles
-
Monsanto Win and Implications for the Patent Exhaustion Doctrine
On May 13, 2013, the United States Supreme Court ruled in favor of Monsanto, finding that a farmer's unauthorized copying of Monsanto's genetically modified soybean seed infringed Monsanto's patent. Writing for a unanimous court, Justice Kagan ...
-
Answers to Frequently Asked Questions: Patents
l. Q. What do the terms "patent pending" and "patent applied for" mean? A. They are used by a manufacturer or seller of an article to inform the public that an application for patent on that article is on file in the Patent and Trademark Office. The ...
-
Avoiding a Jury Trial on the Issue of Infringement Under the Doctrine of Equivalents
Under the doctrine of equivalents, a U.S. patent may be infringed by a product or process that is not identical to the patented invention, so long as the product or process and the patented invention exhibit a sufficient degree of similarity. In a ...
-
Blocking Competitors by PCT Continuation Applications
Thank you for the considerable interest generated by the article "Usurping Competitor's Patent Position By Little Known PCT Procedure" in our May 1995 Intellectual Property Report. The article reported on the option of nationalizing PCT ...
-
Banks and Insurance Companies Seek Patents for New Financial Services
A new Federal Circuit decision has opened the floodgates for patents on new financial services that are enabled by software (and it seems that all new financial services are enabled by software). State Street Bank v. Signature Financial, 47 USPQ2d ...
-
Patent Term Extensions and Restoration under the Hatch-Waxman Act
NOVEMBER 20, 2002 A utility patent confers the right to exclude others from making, using, offering to sell, or selling an invention in the United States. The patent term measures the time period in which a patent holder may exercise patent rights ...
-
Watch Out for Statutory Bars: Don't Lose Patent Rights Before You Even File the Application
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 ...
-
Means-Plus-Function Claims and the Doctrine of Equivalents
The judicial doctrine of claim differentiation permits courts to presume that claims cover different inventions. This provides the basis for the general rule of not reading limitations of a dependent claim into a parent claim. Otherwise, the parent ...
-
Research Method Patents: A Territoriality Loophole?
Recent trial court decisions have exposed an Achilles' heel in licensing regimes for research method patents. In Bayer AG v. Housey Pharmaceuticals, Inc., 169 F. Supp.2d 328 (D. Del. 2001), and in Trustees of Columbia University in City of New York ...
-
Determining the Scope of an Invention as Written in Patent Claims: FindLaw Interview with Byron W. Cooper of Townsend and Townsend and Crew LLP
The most significant issue facing judges, lawyers and litigants in patent cases is how to determine the scope of an invention as written in the patent's claims. Patent claims can be analogized to the metes and bounds description of real property ...