http://www.thefireofgenius.com Academic commentary about patent law, i.p. law, creativity, and more Fri, 18 Jul 2008 15:48:47 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I missed this one in March, but, happily, my Westlaw tracking just picked it up ... In March, Judge Camp, U.S. District Judge for the Northern District of Georgia, issued his opinion in a bench trial in a patent case.  Among the issues Judge Camp decided is whether Kleen-Tex's asserted claims ... http://www.thefireofgenius.com/2008/06/27/kleen-tex-nonobviousness-at-trial/ You've heard of the microblog Twitter, right? I've set up an account there for very short entries about patent law.  It's at http://twitter.com/fireofgenius Let me know if you're also twittering ... http://www.thefireofgenius.com/2008/06/24/twitter/ New York Law School professor James Grimmelmann has written a wonderful, much-needed online essay entitled "Copyright, Technology, and Access to the Law: An Opinionated Primer."  It's available here. Here's the opening paragraph: Recently, the state of Oregon has used copyright law to threaten people who were publishing its laws online. Can they ... http://www.thefireofgenius.com/2008/06/18/copyright-in-and-access-to-law/ Are you curious to know the bottom-line outcomes in the 17 published post-KSR Federal Circuit cases that conduct a nonobviousness inquiry? The below picture sorts the results in a crude, but (I think) interesting way. [ Note (with a hat tip to my anonymous commenter: This count doesn't include ... http://www.thefireofgenius.com/2008/06/12/14-months-of-ksr-world/ Last October, we hosted an interdisciplinary conference about nonobviousness, here at Lewis & Clark Law School. Several of the papers from the conference have now been published in the Lewis & Clark Law Review. You can snag pdfs of the articles at http://www.lclark.edu/org/lclr/current.html It's an interesting collection of psychologists, lawprofs, and ... http://www.thefireofgenius.com/2008/06/12/a-nonobviousness-symposium/ Yesterday, the district court granted summary judgment in favor of promotional CD reseller Troy Augusto on his copyright exhaustion claim. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, representing Augusto, has posted a pdf of the opinion here. Those who wonder whether purported licenses on tangibles ("Not for resale," etc.) can negate the exhaustion principle, in ... http://www.thefireofgenius.com/2008/06/11/exhausted-the-promo-cd-case/ The leading contemporary case citation for understanding whether a reference "teaches away" is In re Gurley, 27 F.3d 551 (Fed. Cir. 1994).  Looking over post-KSR cases about nonobviousness, I thought I was seeing it more than usual (along with discussion of a patentee's "teach away" contention about a piece of ... http://www.thefireofgenius.com/2008/06/10/teach-away-teach-away/ The Court's unanimous, sole opinion in Quanta ends with the following summary paragraph: The authorized sale of an article that substantially embodies a patent exhausts the patent holder’s rights and prevents the patent holder from invoking patent law to control postsale use of the article. Here, LGE licensed Intel to practice ... http://www.thefireofgenius.com/2008/06/09/quantas-end/ Quanta v. LG has been decided today. All I know so far: Justice Thomas wrote for a unanimous Court, reversing the Federal Circuit's decision. More later, after I've seen the opinion. http://www.thefireofgenius.com/2008/06/09/quantas-out/ Here is Clay Shirky's talk at Web 2.0 (Apr 23, 2008), called Gin, Television, and Social Surplus. My favorite bit: "The way you explore complex ecosystems is you just try lots and lots and lots of things, and you hope that everybody who fails fails informatively so that you can at ... http://www.thefireofgenius.com/2008/04/27/sitcom-as-gin/