Patent Baristas

Today is Pi Day 2008.  Pi, Greek letter (), is the symbol for the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. Pi = 3.1415926535… Pi Day is celebrated by math enthusiasts around the world on March 14th at 1:59 p.m.  (*As noted in the comments, this only works if you write the […]

The big buzz around the IP world is that Rick Frenkel, the anonymous blogger of the Troll Tracker blog who just revealed his identity, along with his employer Cisco, have been sued for defamation by two attorneys from Texas, Eric Albritton and T. John Ward, Jr. The lawsuit may be due to a posting over […]

The United States Patent and Trademark Office is moving ever onward with its proposed revision to the rules of practice pertaining to any claim using alternative language to claim one or more species. That is, if the claims use Markush or other forms of alternative language. Markush claims, officially sanctioned since 1924, is a claim drafting technique using the phrase ‘‘selected […]

What happens when a brand name drug company asserts that a patent covers its drug and then pulls it out from the Orange Book? You fight to get it back in, that’s what. In August, Teva Pharmaceuticals USA submitted a Citizen Petition pursuant to section 505 of the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (FDCA) asking […]

Since the original decision in Ex Parte Bilski, the fate of U.S. application 08/833,892 has been a subject of great interest to the patent law community. Last month, the Federal Circuit, on its own initiative, issued an order granting an en banc hearing to the appeal of Bilski’s rejection by the patent office. Since then, […]

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has proposed making changes to the rules regarding when an invention involves biological material.  Often, these can’t be adequately described using just words. As a way to supplement the written description of an invention, courts have sanctioned a procedure in which biological material may be deposited with an […]

Antitrust Review has Blawg Review #149 up and steaming, including “what is undoubtedly the greatest four paragraphs to ever appear in a newspaper.”  This review is chock full of great posts — more than can be absorbed in one sitting. We enjoyed  the Drug and Device Law Blog’s (lengthy) review the FDA’s “new draft guidelines that […]

At the beginning of the last century, the majority of drug products available were ineffective for their stated purpose at best and worsened the conditions they were purported to cure at worse.  For many of these so-called Patent Medicines, the main active ingredient was a form of alcohol (in the case of the Toneco Bitters […]