THE PLUS IP FIRM
We are board-certified intellectual property attorneys, inventors, and engineers that help small-size inventors, entrepreneurs, and businesses register and protect patents, copyrights, and trademarks so you can profit from them faster.
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Written by Mark Terry Happy New Year to all! But not so happy for Applied Materials, Inc., a semiconductor manufacturer in California. Yesterday, the Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office issued a decision largely affirming a Patent Examiner’s rejection of an Applied Materials patent application covering a key semiconductor manufacturing process. Yesterday’s decision revolves mainly around the issue of “optimization of ranges.” To illustrate this issue, assume that the prior art for car-wash technology discloses the placement of water-dispensing nozzles in certain locations inside the car-wash. Let’s say that a client invents a
Written by Mark Terry Today’s Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences (BPAI) decision in Ex Parte Michelle illustrates just how useless the non-analogous art argument really is. Not to beat a dead horse, since much has been written about the uselessness of this argument by my fellow patent prosecution bloggers , but seriously, don’t use this argument anymore. I have yet to see it succeed even once. The Ex Parte Michelle case involved a telecommunications network claim rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103(a) for being obvious. The Appellant tried his hand at the “non-analogous art” defense. The Board summarily dismissed this argument in one sentence:
Written by Mark Terry In its first decision of today, the Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences (BPAI) reversed a Patent Examiner’s 35 U.S.C. sec. 103(a) obviousness rejection of a key Hewlett-Packard software invention, but came up with a new rejection of its own – a 35 U.S.C. sec. 101 non-statutory subject matter rejection. As a Miami Patent Attorney that deals with Patent Office rejections related to software patents and software inventions almost daily, this case is instructive because it illustrates the case law on non-statutory subject matter and the process of dealing with the BPAI. The HP invention involved a software
Written by Mark Terry In one of its first decisions of today, the Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences (BPAI) reversed a Patent Examiner’s 35 U.S.C. §103(a) rejection of a key Verizon invention. As a Miami Patent Attorney, this case was interesting because it illustrates how a 35 U.S.C. §103(a) obviousness rejection can be reversed on appeal to the BPAI. At issue was a Verizon claim that disclosed software for an LDAP server that receives a request in first protocol format and then converts retrieved information from a second protocol format to the first protocol format. The Examiner rejected the Verizon claim
Written by Mark Terry When are your patent claims obvious in light of the prior art? Is it non-obvious to simply combine two known items in a new way? What is the legal criteria for non-obviousness? As a Florida patent attorney with an active patent prosecution docket, I deal with these issues on a daily basis. Today, the Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences at the United States Patent and Trademark Office issued a straightforward and easy-to-understand decision on this issue. Today’s decision in the case of Ex parte Constantinidis relates, among other things, to the issue of whether the claims of the Appellant were
Written by Mark Terry Today the Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences (BPAI) of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office reversed a Patent Examiner’s 35 U.S.C. sec. 103(a) obviousness rejection because the Examiner did not adequately explain why the ordinary artisan would have combined the cited prior art references. As a practicing Miami Patent Lawyer who responds to 35 U.S.C. sec. 103(a) obviousness rejections weekly, today’s decision of the BPAI is instructive because it illustrates a method for attacking obviousness rejections. The patent application at issue belongs to International Specialty Products, a global supplier of pharmaceutical products. The Patent Examiner found multiple prior art references
THE PLUS IP FIRM
We are board-certified intellectual property attorneys, inventors, and engineers that help small-size inventors, entrepreneurs, and businesses register and protect patents, copyrights, and trademarks so you can profit from them faster.
Call Now: 786.443.7720