Reg DeAngelo THE HEALTHY DIVIDE BETWEEN INNOVATORS AND MANAGERS Karen James is one of those software developers: focused, methodical, binary. She is also inventive. She can envision a solution to a problem via lines of code. In the early 90’s Karen wrote a software application that medical staff could use to keep track of patients and manage …
The United States government, through its National Institutes of Health (NIH), supports thousands of drug trials each year, and spends about $40 billion per year on research. At the same time, it continues to grant legal monopolies to companies in the form of patents. These patents are supposed to last 20 years, but some of …
(Originally published May 8, 2019) Eighty percent of our clients are white males. That’s cool, but we’d like to see more women and BIPOC inventors represented. So would the patent office. To that end, the United States Patent and Trademark Office is soliciting comments during open sessions to promote the SUCCESS Act of 2018. Here’s …
Pharma Company Accused of Using Legal Tricks to Squash Generic Version Last October, we wrote about the tactics used by pharma company AbbVie to artificially extend its patents on its billion-dollar drug Humira. Now six groups are filing lawsuits against AbbVie for “anticompetitive conduct.” Humira is a rheumatoid-arthritis and gut-disorders drug that enjoys sales of …
Not to be outdone by Toyota’s “Party Mode” feature, Ford just patented its new “Portable entertainment support system for a pickup truck box” (Patent #10,207,623). It’s an entertainment center for the back of your pickup truck, offering a “plurality of receptacles in sidewalls of a truck box spaced above a truck bed” that make it …
It used to be that you drove your car to a movie theater to watch a movie. Or you drove to a drive-in theater to watch a movie from your car. But who wants that? Why stray more than a few feet from your car, or your driveway for that matter, to enjoy Great Movie …
The makers of the world’s biggest-selling drug cheat competitors and consumers as they extend their exclusive right to sell Humira. Humira is a rheumatoid-arthritis and gut-disorders drug that enjoys sales of around $18 billion a year. Last Tuesday, one of its patents was set to expire. When a drug’s patent expires, generic manufacturers are free …
The US Patent and Trademark Office gives inventors a sort of patenting grace period in the form of a provisional patent. Companies and inventors who think they can exploit this can end up burned. Protecting an innovation with a patent is an enduring American tradition dating back to the time of Thomas Jefferson. The patent …
(Originally published Dec 20, 2018) Amazon applied for a patent that decides whether the face in your peephole belongs to a “suspicious” person. “Generating Composite Facial Images Using Audio/Video Recording and Communication Devices” uses facial-recognition technology to compose an image of the face of the person at your door. The image would be sent by smartphone …
Not all patents are created equal. If you browsed through the eight-million-plus patents granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) since 1836, you would find a surprising number of inventions that would not stand against infringement. Some patents are considered stronger than others. The difference lies not just in the usefulness of …