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The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) announced updates to its website that include new features, content and links as part of their e-gov initiative. Unfortunately, the agency has not made these enhancements in a manner that is readily apparent to users. However, there is an exception to these design problems in the new …
As I reported in November, the USPTO has undertaken an ambitious plan to transition to a paperless public access system. However, this new agency announcement indicates that there is now a greater understanding of the tremendous challenges inherent in this project, and the need to ensure that paper copies continue to be available to prevent …
This Information Week article reports on the huge advantage recently gained by Sony Corp. in the arena of digital rights management (DRM). Their strong position was established as a result of a licensing agreement with ContentGuard Inc., owner of a significant portfolio of DRM patented technologies.
The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) announced that they received 52% of their filings for the month of September electronically. This marks a milestone in the agency’s e-government initiative to migrate filings from paper to online format.
Declan McCullagh reports that the Director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office, James E. Rogan, stated in an October 15 lecture at the Heritage Foundation that the tide has turned on the high acceptance rate for patent applications. Previously, 65-70% of applications were granted, and now that same percentage are rejected. The lecture …
This ZDNet article states that the Patent Policy Working Group’s Royalty-Free Patent Policy has been approved, albeit not published in final version to date.
Attorney Martin Schwimmer launched his Trademark Blog in May, 2002. Via the blog you may access his SchwimmerLegaltrademark metasearch database that facilitates searches for marks in the United States, Finland, WIPO (Madrid), Canada, the UK, Japan, Hungary EC (CTM), Brazil and France that contain a specific search string.
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is making available for sale the complete collection of 65 million U.S. patents that were granted from 1790 to today, on a set of 423 DVDs.
Federal agencies are issuing their information quality guidelines as specified by OMB (see my previous posting here.) The Patent Office guidelines are available at http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/ac/ido/infoqualityguide.html. The Federal Register notice about these guidelines is here.
Akamai and Cable & Wireless have been contesting ownership of a patent for disseminating and routing Internet content.
Judge William S. Ostten of the U.S. District Court, Middle District of North Carolina, decided in favor of the University of North Carolina in a trademark case against Jack R. Erickson. Mr Erickson ran a now defunct porn website that infringed on the university’s trademark, UNC.
BustPatents provides, “legal resources and tools for surviving the patenting frenzy of the Internet, bioinformatics, and electronic commerce.” The site hosts a useful annotated list of national and international patent resources.
