Article Abstract:
The US Patent and Trademark Office erred procedurally and substantively in granting Commissioner of Patents and Trademarks Bruce Lehman's request for reexamination of Compton's multimedia search program patent (no. 5,241,671) and denying the patent's validity on reexamination. Bias can be introduced into the patent process by accepting requests from patent commissioners. The Office appeared to be swayed by complaints from multimedia developers, despite the fact that none of them actually requested reexamination. The Office invalidated the patent based on prior art, but patents can be based on unique use of existing knowledge.
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Article Abstract:
The US Supreme Court probably would have agreed with the US Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit's ruling in Vornado Air Circulation Systems v. Duracraft Corp., but the High Court's failure to grant certiorari has left a split among circuits unresolved. The case involved a conflict between patent law and trade dress law. The 10th Circuit ruled that trade dress protection will not be granted to a manufacturer whose utility patent protection in the same design has expired. Supreme Court precedent is, in fact, consistent with that approach.
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Article Abstract:
The Federal Circuit Court failed to properly evaluate the abstractness of the invention requesting a patent in In re Warmerdam in comparison to the abstractness of other patented inventions that establish precedent. The Court successfully discarded the Freeman-Walter-Abele test as too vague because an accepted definition of a mathematical algorithm does not exist but then failed to recognize the invention as a process improvement idea. The application involved a method for building a robotic collision avoidance system's data structure.
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