The Federal Circuit: Earlier this week, the IPO sent out a flyer demanding more respect for the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. In particular, the organization noted that the court should be referred to as the "Federal Circuit" not the CAFC. IPO pointed out that acronyms are for lower courts such as the BPAI, ITC, CIT, CCPA, etc. I agree with the push for respect. My problem with the "Federal Circuit," however is that it is a poor trademark. It turns out that all appellate courts are "federal circuit courts." - Hal Wegner at the Federal Circuit: Wegner is returning to the Federal Circuit on October 9 to argue against the PTO's product-by-process double patenting rejection of a Takeda patent in reexamination. The identical claims were argued in the 1995 case In re Ochiai (PTO reversed). The patent (No. 5,583,216) claims priority back to an original 1975 application. The issue is the timing of judging product-by-processing double patenting. [Calendar]
- Distance Collaboration: Patent No 7,343,719 is interesting to me because it list 30 different US inventors coming from nine different US states: Illinois, California, Tennessee, Connecticut, Texas, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Wisconsin, and Florida. Have the tools of modern communication changed the nature of invention? The patent covers a machine that cooks and packages French fries.
- The Internet: The chart below shows the percent of issued patents that refer to the "internet."
