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My Crazy Inventions Sketchbook: 50 Awesome Drawing Activities for Young Inventors Written by Lisa Regan Illustrated by Andrew Rae Lawrence King Publishing    9/29/2015 978-1-78067-611-1 128 pages     Ages 8+ “DO YOU HAVE SOME CRAZY INVENTIONS UP YOUR SLEEVE?! “This new doodle book will speak to the imaginative and to future ‘Shark Tank’ contestants …

Although many EU IP lawyers are currently concentrating on the trade mark reforms, the Commission is quietly getting on with its study of the design protection system in Europe. The remit of the study is wide-ranging, but perhaps the most surprising issue that has arisen is whether design law in the EU should protect things that you can’t see.

The post Should design rights protect things you can’t see? appeared first on OUPblog.

The Economist has recently popularised the notion that patents are bad for innovation. Is this right? In my view, this assessment results from too high an expectation of what should be achieved by patents or other intellectual property. Critics of intellectual property rights seem to think that they should be tested by whether they actually increase creativity.

The post Should intellectual property be abolished? appeared first on OUPblog.

Following a preliminary reference made in the context of Seattle Genetics Inc. v Österreichisches Patentamt, the Court of Justice of the European Union has put an end to the uncertainty faced by both the innovative and the generic pharmaceutical industries regarding the duration of the effective patent protection afforded to medicinal products.

The post A European victory for the pharmaceutical industry appeared first on OUPblog.

How do we motivate today’s children to become tomorrow’s movers and shakers in the world of innovation? The answer might be simpler than it sounds. Children have a huge advantage over adults in the creativity department. Children are not predisposed to conclusions that something is impossible, or that there is only one way of doing it. To a child, superheroes are real, and so are their powers. And this is the time to open their minds to the world of new innovations through invention.

I have three young children of my own, and they are always coming up with new ideas. Some of those ideas might not be feasible – at least not today (“Dad, I want to invent a car that flies over this traffic”). But imagine if yesterday’s inventors had been told that “it can’t be done.”

When most of us were growing up, our parents would have laughed at the idea that someday nearly everyone would be carrying around a pocket-size device, not only for making phone calls, but capable of performing complex computer operations that even some desktop computers could not perform at the time. Never mind that this “futuristic device” would be giving us step-by-step directions to the nearest coffee shop, taking high-definition photographs, recording video on-the-go, and the list goes on. Today’s reality would have seemed like nothing more than a child’s fantasy.

Innovation is often born of a curious mind. And children have some of the most curious minds around.

So what can you do as a librarian or someone involved with your local children’s library to help spread the word? Let me introduce USPTO KIDS!

The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) recently revamped their entire kid’s section to bring it into the 21st century. The new website features a section for kids, complete with coloring pages and even pamphlets that explain how to make and launch a model paper rocket, along with directions for making other inventions. The section for kids introduces elementary school age children to the world of inventions through characters such as Ms. Pat Pending and her robot cat Gears, and to the world of trademarks through characters such as Mark Trademan and his friend T.Markey.

The new website also features a section for teens, including biographies of teenagers who have recently received their very own patents. Teens can watch videos and play interactive games to “spot the invention.”

For librarians, the new website includes a variety of educational resources to help guide parents and teachers. Hands-on materials help link the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) education curriculum to real-life innovations. These resources are categorized for elementary school, middle school, and high school age students.
Of course, if you are searching for more ideas, the USPTO KIDS site also includes links to other sites, including many free government resources that are geared toward introducing children to the exciting world of invention.

It is important to encourage children of all ages to explore new ideas. Today’s children are the inventors of tomorrow. Visit USPTO KIDS for ideas on how to bring the world of innovation to a library near you. And if you need another reason, remember that May is National Inventor’s Month!

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Our guest blogger today Mark Trenner. Mark lives in Colorado with his wife and their three children, who regularly visit the local libraries to read about new things. He is an intellectual property (IP) law attorney, and works with leading edge inventors at his Denver-area patent law firm. For more information, view educational videos about patents and invention on his YouTube channel.

Please note that as a guest post, the views expressed here do not represent the official position of ALA or ALSC.

If you’d like to write a guest post for the ALSC Blog, please contact Mary Voors, ALSC Blog manager, at [email protected].

The post Opening the Eyes of Children to a World of Innovation – Where Anything Is Possible appeared first on ALSC Blog.

By Bill Wiist As in many other aspects of the global economy, corporations continue to exert inordinate influence over aspects of trade agreements that control life and death, and the rule of democracy particularly in low and middle-income countries. Corporations are able to disproportionately influence provisions of trade agreements to a far greater extent than public health, labor, other citizen representatives, and low-income countries. Corporations are allowed greater access to the trade agreement development process. For example, in the U.S. the memberships of the advisory committees to the

Charles R. Macedo is a partner at Amster, Rothstein & Ebenstein LLP, and the author of The Corporate Insider’s Guide to US Patent Practice, which provides a basic understanding of patent practice in the United States as it relates to both obtaining and enforcing patents. Macedo’s practice specializes in all facets of intellectual property law including patents, trademarks and copyrights.  In the article below he looks at “patent worthiness.”  Read his other OUPblog posts here.

Speed Dating is not the only issue that our nine Justices of the Supreme Court raised on November 9, 2009 to determine what types of processes should be entitled to “patent worthiness.” Justice Scalia wanted to know why, if the patent laws were intended to cover broad processes, weren’t there any patents filed in the 1800s relating to training horses.

At the time, as Justice Scalia rightly observed, the American economy was completely dependent on horses. In fact, during the late 19th Century commerce came to a standstill when approximately 99% of all horses in America contracted equine influenza. According to Greg Sabin’s February 13, 2009 article, “Nightmare on Wall Street: 4 Other Times Our Economy Tanked“, at the height of the pandemic “as many as 20,000 businesses failed, a third of all railroads went bankrupt, and unemployment spiked to almost 15 percent.”

Not surprisingly, as Justice Scalia suggested, there were many U.S. Patents issued in the late 1800s that taught different methods of training or breaking horses:

* U.S. Patent No. 247,296, to G.W. Blake, entitled “Harness” (patented September 20, 1881);
* U.S. Patent No. 381,745, to H. C. Woodnutt, entitled “Device for Assisting in Training Horses” (patented April 24, 1888);
* U.S. Patent No. 453,727, to H. Sample, entitled “Apparatus for Treating or Taming Horses” (patented June 9, 1891);
* U.S. Patent No. 478,513, to C.C. Kelly, entitled “Apparatus for Training Animals” (patented July 5, 1892); and
* U.S. Patent No. 545,228, to J.W. Green, entitled “Horse-Breaking Apparatus” (patented August 27, 1895).

While admittedly none of these patents claimed a method of training or breaking a horse, they all obtained patent protection for such methods by claiming the apparatus to do it.

There are various explanations of why these patents claimed apparatus instead of methods:

* In the 1800s, most patents were drafted in the form of apparatus or system claims, and not method claims, although the law allowed for method claims in the form of “arts.”
* It was much easier to detect infringement of an apparatus that was sold than to detect a method of performing acts. Thus, not surprisingly, one would be less likely to invest in method claims.
* Perhaps more importantly, the law was in flux as to what type of method claims were available. For example it was not until 1909, in Expanded Metal Co. v. Bradford, 214 U.S. 366 (1909), that the Supreme Court made clear that patent eligible method claims did not merely need to have chemical transformations, but could also include mechanical transformations.

Indeed, when the 1952 Patent Act was adopted, the law was drafted to define patent-eligible methods broadly. See 35 U.S.C. § 100(b). Thus, perhaps Justice Scalia would find it interesting to note that since the Act was enacted, many patents have issued which claim methods of training animals (including horses):

* U.S. Patent No. 3,099,248, to J.K. Giles et al., entitled “Methods of Training Horses” (patented July 30, 1963) (claiming “a method of breaking and training horses preparatory to racing”);
* U.S. Patent No. 5,566,645, to T.H. Cole, entitled “Animal Training Method and Apparatus” (patented October 22, 1996) (claiming “[a] method for training animals”);
* U.S. Patent No. 6,311,645, to J.S. Brown, entitled “Animal Training Method and Apparatus” (patented November 6, 2001) (claiming “[a] method of training an animal”);
* U.S. Patent No. 6,352,053, to D. Records et al., entitled “Apparatus and Method for Animal Testing and Training” (patented March 5, 2002) (claiming “[a] method permitting an observer to determine the bucking propensity of an animal such as a bull or horse”);
* U.S. Patent No. 6,568,940, to M. Mack, entitled “Equestrian Training Method” (patented May 27, 2003) (claiming “[a] method for equestrian training”);
* U.S. Patent No. 6,602,209, to D.H. Lambert et al., entitled “Method and Device for Analyzing Athletic Potential in Horses” (patented August 5, 2003) (claiming “[a] method for predicting potential performance in a selected racing or training animal”);
* U.S. Patent No. 7,107,939, to L.J. Lady, entitled “Animal Training Apparatus and Method” (patented September 19, 1996) (claiming “[a] method for training a four-legged animal”); and
* U.S. Patent No. 7,331,310, to K. Sersland et al., entitled “Domestic Animal Training Method” (patented Feb 19, 2008) (claiming “[a]n animal training method”).

Turning back the patent law to the uncertainty of the 1800s, when our economy was based on agrarian and early industrial technology, is not what our nation needs in this time of economic crisis.

The point is that any subject should be available for patent protection, whether it is Speed Dating, Horse Training, or Hedging Risk, so long it does not claim the subject in an abstract manner.

Mark Simon Davies is a counsel at O’Melveny & Myers LLP, where he works on appellate matters in one of the top Supreme Court and Appellate practices in the country. Davies is the author of Patent Appeals: The Elements of Effective Advocacy in the Federal Circuit.

Yesterday, the Supreme Court issued another significant opinion in patent law. In a unanimous opinion authored by Justice Thomas, the Court held that a patent owner who licenses the sale of components has “exhausted” patent rights even where the components must be combined with additional components to practice the patent. In so deciding, the Court reasoned that the exhaustion doctrine applies to sales of products that include only the “inventive aspect” of the patent. This unanticipated focus of the Court’s decision reflects the Court’s apparent continuing interest in refocusing patent law on protecting the “inventive” contribution.

The question before the Court was whether the patent rights of LG Electronics, Inc. were “exhausted” by its license agreement with Intel Corporation. Under the exhaustion (or first sale) doctrine, “the initial authorized sale of a patented item terminates all patent rights to that item.” Here, LGE owns patents covering various methods of managing main computer memory. LGE licensed Intel to manufacture and sell microprocessors and chipsets that practice the LGE patents. Intel sold the parts to Quanta Computer, a group of computer manufacturers, who made computers using the LGE/Intel microprocessors and chipsets in combination with non-LGE/Intel computer parts. LGE filed a complaint against Quanta, asserting that the combination of the LGE/Intel products with other computer parts infringed its patents. Quanta defended on the ground that LGE’s license to Intel “exhausted” and thus terminated its patent rights.

In siding with Quanta to find that LGE had exhausted its patent rights, the Supreme Court’s opinion proceeds in three steps. The Court begins by rejecting LGE’s argument that the exhaustion doctrine does not apply to “method” claims (i.e., claims that are not linked to a tangible article). The Court was wary that “[e]liminating exhaustion for method patents would seriously undermine the exhaustion doctrine” because patentees “could simply draft their patent claims to describe a method rather than an apparatus.” Next, the Court considered the “extent to which a product must embody a patent in order to trigger exhaustion.” On that question, the Court found that United States v. Univis Lens Co., 316 U.S. 241 (1942), “governs this case.” Just as the product in Univis “embodie[d] essential features of [the] patented invention,” so too Intel’s products embody “[e]verything inventive about each patent” and thus triggered patent exhaustion. “The Intel Products embody the essential features of the LGE Patents because they carry out all the inventive processes when combined, according to their design, with standard components.” Last, the Court determined that LGE’s contract with Intel “authorized” the sale of the products that practiced LGE’s patents (“Intel’s authority to sell its products embodying the LGE Patents was not conditioned on the notice”), and the Court expressed “no opinion on whether contract damages might be available even though exhaustion operates to eliminate patent damages.”

In various procedural respects, today’s decision resembles the Supreme Court’s patent law decisions of the past few terms. As it did most prominently in KSR Intn’l v. Teleflex Inc., 127 S. Ct. 1727 (2007), the Court has once again unanimously reversed a lower court decision based on a long-settled Federal Circuit rule favoring patent owners. As the briefing before the Court had emphasized, the Federal Circuit’s decision in Mallinckrodt, Inc. v. Medipart, Inc., 976 F.2d 700 (Fed. Cir. 1992), held that the patent-exhaustion doctrine does not apply to an “expressly conditional sale.” As in KSR, the Supreme Court declined to endorse the Federal Circuit’s “conditional sale” test. Instead, the Supreme Court again emphasized the abiding relevance of its older patent law decisions. Thus, here the Court found that Univis “governs this case” much like the KSR Court found that Graham v. John Deere Co. of Kansas City, 383 U.S. 1 (1966), provides the current “framework” for whether a claimed invention is “obvious.” Unlike KSR, however, the Court did not directly fault the Federal Circuit for a “rigid rule” (or even specifically refer to Mallinckrodt).

As is often the case with Supreme Court opinions, the immediate practical consequences of today’s decision may well be limited. The Court’s ruling that the sale here was not in fact conditional arguably leaves parties free to argue that the Federal Circuit’s “conditional sale” bar on exhaustion remains the law. Moreover, the Court expressly declined to consider whether LGE could use contract law to achieve its apparent objective of requiring its patent devices only to be used in computers manufactured with LGE parts.

Nevertheless, today’s Quanta decision provides a strong indication that the Supreme Court intends to continue restricting the enforceable scope of patents. The Solicitor General recommended that the Court hear Quanta. But the Supreme Court went beyond the Solicitor General’s request. Rejecting the advice of the Solicitor General not to reach the question, the Court relied on Univis to hold that the exhaustion doctrine applies to a product that embodies “[e]verything inventive” about the patent even if further “common and noninventive” steps are necessary to practice the patented invention. In this respect, Quanta is in close step with KSR. KSR closed by emphasizing that “the results of ordinary innovation are not the subject of exclusive rights under the patent laws.” So too in Quanta, the Court explained that a patent owner could not avoid the impact of the patent exhaustion doctrine merely because the patent includes “common” steps. In both cases, the Court has refocused patent law on protecting the “inventive aspect” of a patented invention.

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I was in a bookstore the other day, perusing what there was to peruse, and I came across the two recently republished Peter Newell books The Slant Book and Topsys & Turvys. They're so delightful. I think we may even have some originals in Donnell. If you've never seen these titles, do yourself a favor and find one immediately. They are lovely examples of a man pushing the envelope on kidlit before they'd invented an envelope to push.

Apparently Newell was not unaware of how cool his radical books were either. In 1910 he patented his designs. I recently discovered A Blog of Bosh, the site that posts such information, and I like it very much. I can't for the life of me figure out who the author is, but it seems to have some connection to nonsenselit.org, which is also rather interesting.