Patent Litigation, Inventors, Innovation

Death and Taxes Should not be Certainties for the Patent System

McDonnell Boehnen Hulbert & Berghoff LLP on 7/30/2025

The Department of Commerce has floated a proposal to tax U.S. patent holdings as a means of reducing the national debt, as outlined in a recent Wall Street Journal article. It is a bad idea that reflects a troubling...more

Bit Swap: Motivation to Modify Prior Art Needn’t Be Inventor’s Motivation

McDermott Will & Schulte on 1/16/2025

Addressing the issue of obviousness, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit reversed a Patent Trial & Appeal Board decision, finding that the challenged patent claims were obvious because a person of ordinary skill...more

The Legal Ramifications of Inventorship: What You Need To Know

Woods Rogers on 5/30/2023

There is the old adage in business: to go fast, go alone; and to go far, go together. When this applies to innovation and naming co-inventors in your patent application, it is important to understand the legal ramification...more

“Shall Be the Property” Is Insufficient to Automatically Assign Title to an Invention in a Contract

Haug Partners LLP on 9/14/2021

On August 2, 2021, in Omni MedSci, Inc. v. Apple Inc., No. 20-1715, slip op. (Fed. Cir. Aug. 2, 2021), a Federal Circuit panel decision, with a dissent, upheld the district court’s denial of Apple Inc.’s (“Apple”) motion to...more

PATENT 101: Key Considerations and Activities for Establishing a Patent Program (Part 1 of 3)

Mintz - Intellectual Property Viewpoints on 7/8/2021

Tasked with starting an innovation protection and patent development program at your company but do not know where to begin? This three part series describes the key components to a patent development program for any company,...more

Pigs Fly, Hell Has Frozen Over, and the New York Times Supports Small Inventor and University Patenting

McDonnell Boehnen Hulbert & Berghoff LLP on 10/29/2015

Admittedly, only on its Op-Ed page. But last Saturday Joe Nocera wrote a remarkably sane and reasoned column, entitled "The Patent Troll Smokescreen," pointing out that "big companies with large lobbying budgets" are using...more