The Dolcera Blog

Social Media and networking websites have affected the life of people in one way or the other. Simply put, we are all hooked by these websites. We at Dolcera thought that it may be interesting to make a preliminary research on the social media to find their nexus with the patenting fraternity. This blog post is mainly to share the preliminary research with our readers.

The following graph shows the IP activity over the last few years. There is certainly an upward trend since 2004 however, the year 2008 & 2009 IP activity could be marred by the Bilski repercussions on the business method patents among other reasons. It is also to be noted that 2009 data is not up to date owing to the data unavailability.

The following graph shows the IPC classes that were taken into the consideration while doing the search.

The following graph shows the patent assignee information in this field.

Note: The patent counts for some of the prominent social media websites are Facebook(48) and Myspace & Technorati with just less than 20 each.

Finally, I would like to thank my colleagues Harit Mohan & Samir Raiyani for their help in this exercise.

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James Watson was on Charlie Rose last night. He made some very interesting points:

• In the 21st century, psychology will finally become a science
• The genetics of psychological disorders such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder etc. is not understood at all, and very little investment is going into these fields
• We need a fight against psychological disorders on the same scale as the fight against cancer
• A lot has been learned in the fight against cancer (from the billions spent), and a cure for cancer seems to be closer than ever

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The results of PG diploma (2008-2009), a course offered by NALSAR - Hyderabad in patent laws, was declared today. With 100 % passing percentage the environment in office was jubilating.What else could be better Diwali gift than this, said the cheered Dolcerians?

Dolcera is first to report online analysis of passing percentage this year. The graph below reflects the trend of how students all over India performed in the exam.

Click here to download the result sheet.

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Prosecution history estoppel, also known as file-wrapper estoppel essentially means that when an inventor during prosecution narrows down his invention to escape prior art by some amendment, then he cannot claim that someone else infringed his patent under doctrine of equivalence (DOC). Amendment to the patent claims and argument by the patentee during the patent application process may limit the range of equivalents to which patentee is later entitled under the DOC.

The prosecution history estoppel is invoked to prevent the application of the doctrine of equivalents where claim scope has been surrendered either by express disclaimer or by narrowing amendment. The scope of application of prosecution history estoppel to this latter category has been the subject of much debate in the US patent bar.

One of the famous case that examined the relationship between doctrine of equivalents and the doctrine of prosecution history estoppel is Festo Corp. v. Shoketsu Kinzoku Kogyo Kabushiki Co.

Petitioner Festo Corporation owns two patents for an improved magnetic rodless cylinder, a piston-driven device that relies on magnets to move objects in a conveying system. The device has many industrial uses and has been employed in machinery as diverse as sewing equipment and the Thunder Mountain ride at Disney World.

Shoketsu Kinzoku Kogyo Kabushiki Co. entered the market with a device that used one two-way sealing ring and a nonmagnetizable sleeve. Festo Corporation already owned two similar patents (although their initial patent application was rejected) for this industrial device.

Festo filed infringement suite against Shoketsu under the DOC.

Petitioner’s patent applications, as often occurs, were amended during the prosecution proceedings. The application for the first patent (U.S. Patent No. 4,354,125), was amended after the patent examiner rejected the initial application because the exact method of operation was unclear and some claims were made in an impermissible way. The inventor submitted a new application designed to meet the examiner’s objections and also added certain references to prior art. The second patent (U.S. Patent No. 3,779,401), was also amended during a reexamination proceeding. The prior art references were added to this amended application as well.

Shoketsu claimed that prosecution history estoppel should bar Festo from asserting equivalents.

Court’s Decision

According to the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts, Festo’s amendments were not made to avoid prior art, and therefore the amendments were not the kind that give rise to estoppel. A panel of the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed. 72 F.3d 857 (1995). We granted certiorari, vacated, and remanded in light of our intervening decision in Warner-Jenkinson v. Hilton Davis Chemical Co.After a decision by the original panel on remand, 172 F.3d 1361 (1999), the Court of Appeals ordered rehearing en banc to address questions that had divided its judges since decision in Warner-Jenkinson.

The en banc court reversed, holding that prosecution history estoppel barred Festo from asserting that the accused device infringed its patents under the doctrine of equivalents. 234 F.3d 558 (2000). The court held, with only one judge dissenting, that estoppel arises from any amendment that narrows a claim to comply with the Patent Act, not only from amendments made to avoid prior art. Id., at 566. More controversial in the Court of Appeals was its further holding: When estoppel applies, it stands as a complete bar against any claim of equivalence for the element that was amended. Id., at 574—575. The court acknowledged that its own prior case law did not go so far. Previous decisions had held that prosecution history estoppel constituted a flexible bar, foreclosing some, but not all, claims of equivalence, depending on the purpose of the amendment and the alterations in the text. The court concluded, however, that its precedents applying the flexible-bar rule should be overruled because this case-by-case approach has proved unworkable. In the court’s view a complete-bar rule, under which estoppel bars all claims of equivalence to the narrowed element, would promote certainty in the determination of infringement cases.

Source:

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosecution_history_estoppel

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Festo_Corp._v._Shoketsu_Kinzoku_Kogyo_Kabushiki_Co.

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=455380

 

Biplab Dey

Knowledge Scientist

Dolcera

 

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Gmail team announced a small Task manager called ‘Tasks’ as a lab feature last year.Tasks feature is now embedded into gmail as a permanent feature on main page. Some features includes: *Note the “to do list”,set the due date and write the notes for every task in the list. *View the completed and uncompleted tasks. *Clear the tasks *Print the task list *Sort the task list Click here for complete video on new feature ‘Tasks’.

The New York Times today has an article describing how the German Mittelstand companies are coping with the downturn. One interesting concept they describe in the story is that of “time accounts.”

Employees are tapping “time accounts,” a device that Trumpf and many other companies created over the last decade to cushion the effects of a slowdown.

During the fat years, employees stored hours of overtime, for which they were not then paid, in anticipation of tougher times. Now those hours are being paid out, keeping paychecks heftier than they would be otherwise.

Why doesn’t the services world employ this strategy around the world?

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Here is the explanation: For this option “Reduce to One Member per Family” we use the default order US-WO-EP-JP-GB-DE-FR for selecting the representative document, the Worksheet retains only one family member and deletes the other patents from the list. This feature gives you the basis for analysis of patents by family, eliminating the distortion that results from counting the same invention in each country. This is how we determine what document to keep. In each family, documents are sorted by country code, in order of preference: US WO EP JP GB DE FR. The first group of patents or authority (let’s say there are multiple US documents) is then sorted by date (oldest first) and then we choose the first record or oldest record.

A very large percentage of technical information that is generated across the globe reside in the patent databases.

Below chart depicts breakup according to country and application type for major filing countries. Data Source - patentanalysis.com

 

Data collected through a survey say that there are:

• 72 million patent documents worldwide
• appx. 15 million inventions
• 1,000,000 patent in last 10 years
• Weekly - More than 10,000 new patents
• Every 30 seconds a new patent document is added to the vast technical library of patent documents

The statistics clearly indicates

• Increase in R & D efforts
• Increase in patent filing efforts
• Increase in market coverage through family patent filing

Potential Risks

• Patent grant rate is bound to go down. According to a study, already the Belgium PTO has a 30% grant rate
• Risk of reinventing the wheel, if patentability / prior art search not performed thoroughly
• Large number of patents may get invalidated by other relevant patents thus causing many infringement law suits to become void
• Need of clearance would increase

- Abdul -

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Create your own visitor map

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