As the buying and selling of goods has migrated from brick-and-mortar stores to online marketplaces, numerous legal and regulatory issues have arisen in this competitive marketplace, particularly in the context of intellectual property rights.  Fortunately, Amazon has made significant strides in adopting tools to help rights holders enforce their patents against infringers. Amazon provides two […]

In the United States, any Registered Patent Attorney carries a unique and specialized set of education and skills.  To be a Registered Patent Attorney (or often just “patent attorney”) one must be both a lawyer and also a trained scientist or engineer. This requires at least a Bachelor’s degree in a hard science such as […]

A US design patent provides protection for the ornamental design of an invention. A design that is substantially similar to the patented design cannot be made, used, sold, offered for sale, or imported into the United States without the permission of the patent owner. In practical terms, design patents are extremely useful for stopping and/or […]

Clients often ask “what are my chances of getting a patent?” In other words, clients are asking about the average allowance rate – which is the rate that an application gets allowed vs. goes abandoned. The simple answer is this: The allowance rate of an average patent application is slightly greater than 70%. However, with […]

On March 29, 2022, a federal judge in the state of Illinois’s federal court invalidated the claims of a plaintiff’s patent as being “indefinite” under 35 U.S.C. §112. The individual plaintiff was suing HP, Inc. for induced infringement of his document archival patent. A copy of the full text of the invalidated patent can be […]

Patents have a term of 20 years from the filing date. After this term, the technology enters the public domain for all to use. This balances incentivizing innovation during the patent term with allowing further innovation and broader access after the term expires. Often, clients ask how they can extend or otherwise expand upon the […]

Determining the Difference Between Ornamentality and Functionality The fundamental difference between design patents and utility patents is that design patents protect how an article looks; whereas, utility patents protect the way an article is used and works. In other words, design patents protect the purely ornamental characteristics of an article. Simple enough, right? Wrong. Sometimes […]

Establishing Patent Infringement Venue Today and in the “New Normal” In 2017, The United States Supreme Court decided that a 1957 opinion is still valid and still limits venue choices for patent infringement actions under 28 U.S.C. § 1400. See TC Heartland LLC v. Kraft Foods Group Brands LLC, 581 U.S. ___ (2017) (citing Fourco […]

A Brief Summary of the Patent Process Whenever we meet with a new client who has not gone through the patent process before (and even when they have), we make sure to give them a brief summary of what they can expect. The patenting process involves multiple steps. Depending on the invention, the prior art […]

The Importance of Stepping Into the Shoes of the Person of Ordinary Skill in the Art (POSITA) All too often patent examiners and patent practitioners give lip service to the importance of the “person of ordinary skill in the art” (“POSITA”) when discussing issues such as obviousness rejections, the meaning of claim terms in litigation, […]

One particularly frustrating rejection that patent applicants can be faced with is a rejection alleging obviousness based on “design choice.” These rejections arise when one or more elements of an invention are not disclosed in the prior art, but the examiner nonetheless alleges that there are only “minor” differences between the claims and the prior […]