Category: Intellectual Property

As any geek knows, 21 October 2015 is Back to the Future Day.

In celebration thereof, I present to you on this 21 October 2015 a patent for the most oh-so-desirable device ripped straight from the movie franchise: a magnetic hover-board!

It’s not a flying car, but it gets you there.

My mother died in January of this year; she had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s about a year before she went. Pneumonia took her while she still remembered me and still had many of her long-term memories intact; I thank goodness that she was spared the living hell that she would have gone through with the total degeneration of her once-active mind.

Her diagnosis, of course, got me interested in this horrible condition. In the course of my research, I came across an HBO special on the progress of the disease. It’s beautifully done, which is why I post it here.

Another resource that I found very useful was a novel entitled Still Alice by Lisa Genovia. This was made into a movie starring Julianne Moore in her first Oscar performance.

My daughter has “rolling” veins. Honestly, whenever she has an venous puncture, the needle pokes and tears her surrounding tissues, searching for a vein. Only the most skilled phlebotomists (and one absolutely amazing nurse) can find her veins on the first try.

Enter a cool new invention (wish I’d written the patent for it). A “vein viewer” gives the practitioner an HD view of the veins in a person’s appendage. The vein viewer uses near-infrared light to locate the hemoglobin in the blood in the veins and project an image of the veins on the person’s skin, making finding the vein on the first poke much, much easier.

Is that cool or what?

Merry Christmas to one and all..

“I’m alone and outgunned, scared and inexperienced, but I’m right.”
–John Grisham, The Rainmaker (emphasis added)

I find this quote apropos to a litigation I’m currently handling. When the opposing counsel’s 50-cal cannon booms, that cannon has shot off only one round, and now it must be reloaded. I, on the other hand, have a six-shooter; I can get off six shots to their one.

And my client is in the right.

Sometimes the Other Two types of patent get short shrift in the mainstream patent press. Not so this week. The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) has just decided In re: Walter F. Beineke, Dockets 2011-1459, -1460, ___ USPQ ____. Beineke appealed from the USPTO’s rejection of his claims for patent protection for varieties of white oak trees that exhibit stronger genetic traits than do other trees of that species that he found in a yard not his own. Those trees are about 115 years old, making proof of human intervention in their breeding — um — difficult. Beineke couldn’t show to the Examiner’s satisfaction that the trees were “cultivated.”

The patentability of plants is established under 35 USC 161, which states:

Whoever invents or discovers and asexually reproduces any distinct and new variety of plant, including cultivated sports, mutants, hybrids, and newly found seedlings, other than a tuber propagated plant or a plant found in an uncultivated state, may obtain a patent therefor, subject to the conditions and requirements of this title.

Beineke argued that, under 161, a human being need not participate in the creation of the new plant; the USPTO argued that, under 161, no plant is patentable unless a human being participate in its creation. This clash led to two rejected patent applications, two BPAI appeals and, finally, to the consolidated appeal before the CAFC.

The CAFC held that a plant must have been created by human activity and it must have been created by its inventor. Thus, a plant, it is now clear, cannot be patented unless there has been some human intervention in the breeding of that plant. The Court says, “[T]he … Act was not meant to include plants discovered by chance by plant explorers and the like.”