Patent Baristas

The Ohio Supreme Court has ruled that a company’s confidential customer list is a protected trade secret even if a former employee retains the information purely from memory.
This doesn’t change the law, a trade secret is a trade secret regardless of whether it is memorized or in a more tangible form, just clarifies that even [...]

Every now and then I have an application that is subject to a secrecy order by the government that restricts disclosure of the invention and prevents the publishing or granting of a patent. I noticed that a current application being held up really doesn’t seem to contain sensitive information but the application may have triggered [...]

Conducting a thorough IP due diligence review is a critical aspect of successful tech deals – especially in the bioscience industry. The intellectual property at issue can make or break a deal. It is imperative that you know what you have (or are getting) is the real deal.
When undertaking a due diligence review during a [...]

The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) announced the settlement of their suit against Nektar Therapeutics and Dr. Milton Harris, the founder of Nektar Alabama and a former employee of UAH, in exchange for a total cash payment of $25 million.
Under the terms of the agreement, Nektar and Dr. Harris have jointly made an upfront [...]

A former University of Alabama professor is being sued by the University of Alabama System claiming that it owns his patents worth $197 million. The complaint was filed by The Board of Trustees of the University of Alabama against Nektar Therapeutics AL, Corporation, and Nektar Therapeutics in the United States District Court for the Northern [...]

A new (to me) blog I noticed recently is the IP Counsel Blog by Todd Mayover. It’s labeled as “discussing issues that concern the practice of in-house intellectual property attorneys.” Mayover is an in-house intellectual property attorney for a medical device manufacturing company in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The site is well-done and has some good [...]

Legal Times published an article detailing the prevalence in the business of corporate espionage using the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to gain competitive information. Companies are increasingly turning to teams of hired lawyers and analysts who request all data involving a competitor. Targets have included Boeing, MCI WorldCom Inc., McDonnell Douglas, and the General [...]

A U.S. District Court ordered Nobel Prize winner and former Yale University professor John Fenn, 87, to pay Yale $545,000 in royalties and penalties, and pay their legal bills of almost $500,000. While at Yale in the late 1980s, Fenn developed a method for mass spectrometric analysis of chemical compounds in solution concerned with determining [...]