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
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One-Click or Two? The War Over Business Method Patents
When you.re Time magazine.s Man of the Year, you tend to attract a lot of attention. Just ask Jeff Bezos. Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com, stirred up a firestorm this year among legal and e-commerce experts over the issue of business method patents. The ...
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Warning: The Federal Circuit Has Determined That Your Notice of Infringement May Be Dangerous to Your Venue
Recent decisions by the U.S. Federal Circuit Court of Appeals may dictate a change in the customary practice of giving pre-litigation notices of infringement of U.S. patents, or at least indicate caution in doing so. For a number of decades the U.S ...
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Computer Program Product Claims Allowed By the European Patent Office: Impact on Software Patent Claiming
The Board of Appeal of the European Patent Office (EPO) recently rendered two important decisions relating to the patentability of software inventions in Europe. Both cases relate to patent applications filed by IBM Corporation. In these cases, the ...
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Patent Management: Preserve Your Damages by Proper Marking and Infringement Notices
Has your client marked his patented product with the patent number? Required his customers to do so? If not, should he and can he start doing so now? When warning a suspected infringer of his patent has he specifically charged infringement of the ...
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Security Interest in a Patent Is Perfected Under the U.C.C., Not the Patent Act
In Moldo v. Matsco (In re Cybernetic Services, Inc.), the Bankruptcy Appellate Panel of the Ninth Circuit ("BAP") affirmed the bankruptcy court's holding that perfection of a security interest in a patent does not require a filing with the United ...
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Drug Price Competition and Patent Term Restoration Act
Introduction A U.S. patent term runs for 17 years from the patent's issue date or 20 years from the date of the patent's first filing. (1) However, product testing, development, and compliance with federal marketing requirements can consume some of ...
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U.S. Patent Overview
Protecting the product of one's mental labor can be in the form of patents, trademarks, copyrights, and trade secrets. In general, patents protect inventions of tangible things such as a machine, process, chemical formula; copyrights protect ...
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Inherency In The Prior Art: The Rules Are Becoming Clearer
When is your invention "known" from a prior art reference thus rendering your invention unpatentable? If a prior art reference teaches your invention but does not explicitly recite each and every element, must the presence of the unrecited element ...
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Patents on Medical Procedures and The Physician Profiteer
The first reported effort by an American physician to enforce a medical method patent against a colleague failed last month in a federal district court in Burlington, Vermont. Judge William Sessions III ruled, in the landmark case, that an eye ...
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Patent Marking Requirements: Patented Articles Must be Marked as Patented in Order For Patentee to Recover Damages Due to Patent Infringement
DECEMBER 19, 2002 - Patented articles (products, devices, items, etc.) must be marked as patented if patentee is to be awarded damages resulting from infringement of the patent. The marking provisions of the patent statute are within 35 U.S.C. ...