Patent

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.

Intellectual Property

Patent Articles

The Looming Crisis Over the Research Use Exception To Patent Infringement: What Madey Taught Duke University

Madey v. Duke, F.3d, 2002 WL 31190842 (Fed. Cir. October 3, 2002) (Gajarsa, J.), promises to set off a lively debate about the direction of research at federally funded universities and in particular the role of patents both to protect the ...
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The Next Patent Frontier: Financial Product Patents

Like their software predecessors in the 1980s and their fallen Internet brethren of the 1990s, managers of financial products and services are entering a brave new world where management of intellectual property assets has become vital to protecting ...
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The Patenting Process

This is a summary of the patenting process and does not include events that may complicate the process. This information is being provided for information purposes only. Provision of this information does not create an attorney/client relationship ...
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The Perils of Poor Drafting

Patent applications should be thoroughand complete before they're filed with the PTO. Editor's Note: This article originally was publishedin the April 12, 1999 edition of Legal Times Ring-a-ring. Ring-a-ring. Two minutes back from vacation, and it ...
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The Right Prescription

one of 11 different practice groups within the pharmaceutical company's worldwide Legal Division, had a problem. Charged with protecting the company's products from fraudulent imitations, thefts and other threats, Global Security needed an ...
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The Risk-Reward Factors of U.S. Patents

Damages awards in U.S. patent infringement cases have been recognized as reaching magnitudes rarely seen in other countries. During the last decade there have been about 20 to 30 patent infringement cases a year with published judicial awards of ...
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The Solution to Patent Problems

Patents for business methods and software are under attack by a variety of critics. Some claim that many of the innovations patented fail to meet the statutory tests of novelty and nonobviousness. Others, including Stanford University law professor ...
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The Supreme Court’s Decision in Festo Corp.: An Important New Development Regarding the Scope of Patent Protection

On May 28, a unanimous Supreme Court addressed the conditions under which prosecution-history estoppel bars a patent owner from using the doctrine of equivalents where the patent applicant, during prosecution, narrowed a claim limitation to obtain ...
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The U.S. Supreme Court Vacates Festo Reaffirming the Importance of Equitable Patent Protection

NOVEMBER 20, 2001 - Contrary to rampant speculation in the legal community that the doctrine of equivalents for patent claims was dead or nearly so, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously reasserted the legal vitality of equitable patent rights in the ...
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The Value of “Research Tool” Patents in View of Integra v. Merck

(This article first appeared in the August 2003 issue of Law Journal Newsletters - ) On June 6, 2003, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit seemingly breathed new life into research tool patents when it held that the use of patented peptides ...
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