Raytheon inventions are programs and not patentable, says High Court
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Backs Comptroller General in patent denial The High Court has backed the Comptroller General of Patents in refusing a company a patent for inventions which were computer programs. The ruling in the appeal followed the lead of a recent landmark case.â¦
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In what could be the final word on the subject from a patent authority, the International Trade Commission has upheld a ruling last October stating that networking technology supplier Qualcomm did indeed infringe upon a critical patent held by technology developer Broadcom.
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The Supreme Court has denied a challenge to the federal Do Not Call List. Telemarketing companies had filed an appeal, saying the registry violated First Amendment rights because some groups were exempt from the rules.
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Computer software should not be  protected by copyright laws designed for music, literature and  other creative works, according to a lawsuit filed in a U.S.  court in San Francisco.
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A federal appeals court ruled Wednesday that Louisiana's attorney general can't sue the Army Corps of Engineers on behalf of Hurricane Katrina victims who don't have lawyers.
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WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court on Wednesday made it harder for consumers to sue manufacturers of federally approved medical devices.
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Bloomberg News broke the news yesterday that Microsoft will be allowed to argue that patents held by research firm Eolas Technologies regarding the ability to embed functionality in a Web browser page are invalid, when a retrial of Eolas' long-running patent suit begins on July 9.
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(InfoWorld) - Citing a mistaken filing, Microsoft has abandoned a patent application for technology in its Visual Studio software development platform that originated outside the company, a Microsoft representative said on Tuesday. The application involved Microsoft's implementation of the BlueJ developer environment, which the company calls "Object Test Bench," said the representative, who attributed the company's response to an InfoWorld press inquiry on the subject to Jason Matusow, Microsoft's senior directory of IP and interoperability. "Microsoft mistakenly filed for a patent on a technology included in components of Visual Studio 2005 that was based upon an academic project to help individuals grasp introductory concepts of software programming through pictorial representation of code," the representative said. The company had been notified by Michael KÃ¶lling, the creator of BlueJ, that the patent application covered technology substantially similar to his project. BlueJ is an IDE for teaching object-oriented programming and Java to beginners, according to KÃ¶lling's blog. "Microsoft agrees with Professor KÃ¶lling, and in keeping with the companyâs standards for quality patent filings, [it is] expressly abandoning the patent application with the USPTO (United States Patent & Trademark Office) through normal procedures," the company said. KÃ¶lling could not be reached for comment on Tuesday. But in his blog, he raised the question of whether Microsoft's patent application would be denied because it was based on "prior art," which is technology that already existed. "While I am sure we would have had a good case to file for prior art, and while it is likely that this would have stopped the application, I really have better things to do with my time," he wrote. In a blog entry last Friday, KÃ¶lling had expressed fears that the patent application could destroy BlueJ.
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The dangers of software patents for free software have always been a hot issue.  But with the news that Red Hat and Novell are being sued for alleged patent infringement by IP Innovation, the matter has moved from theory into practice.  In fact, in the battle against software patents, it turns out that the open source world already has a rather powerful weapon in its armoury â even if it's one that few people know about. read more
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Biotech and high technology, two key Massachusetts industries, are often seen as allies -- innovation-driven businesses that depend on a highly educated workforce. But this week they're on opposite sides of a fight playing out in Washington: How to overhaul the nation's patent system.
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A proposed class-action lawsuit was filed yesterday against Boeing and Aetna Life Insurance, charging that valid employee-disability claims were systematically denied.
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U.S. Supreme Court justices on  Wednesday expressed doubts about whether Microsoft Corp.   should be liable for infringing AT&T Inc.   patents in Windows software sold overseas, a case that could  determine the reach of American patents in foreign markets.
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A legal row between Microsoft and AT&T about overseas patents heads to the US Supreme Court.
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A U.S. judge ruled that Google Inc.'s  3D modeling software, which gives Web users an astronaut's view of the earth and allows them to zoom down to street level, does not infringe the patent of a rival.
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Arguments were heard today in a case whose outcome could require software companies to pay fines for patent-infringing software assembled in other countries.
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The US Court of Appeals has ruled that Lawsuits in Motion - aka Research in Motion - did indeed violate patents owned by intellectual property holding company NTP.
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Google responded on Friday to a lawsuit filed against it by Northeastern University, denying claims that its search service infringes on patented technology.Google denied all charges in the suit, which was&#160;filed jointly by Northeastern, of Boston, and a search technology company called Jarg, of Waltham, Mass. Google also filed a counterclaim asking the court to dismiss the patent as invalid.The&#160;suit was filed in November&#160;in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas. It seeks an injunction preventing Google from further infringement, as well as royalty payments and damages.The patent in question describes a distributed database system that breaks queries into fragments and distributes them to multiple computers in a network to get faster search results.The plaintiffs say that Google uses this system to run its search engine, and that the system was invented by Kenneth Baclawski, an associate professor at Northeastern and one of Jarg&#39;s founders. Northeastern was awarded a patent for the system, which it has licensed exclusively to Jarg.In its response Friday, Google argued that the patent is invalid and should not have been awarded in the first place. It cites various sections of U.S. patent law, including those that deal with the novelty of an invention and prior art. It also cites the doctrine of &quot;laches,&quot; which essentially requires plaintiffs to file lawsuits in a timely manner.Its counterclaim asks the court to declare the patent invalid and unenforceable.Both parties have requested a jury trial, and legal experts have said the case could be resolved in 18 months to two years.The U.S. patent, number 5,694,593, is dated Dec. 2, 1997, and can be viewed by searching the Web site of the U.S. Patent &amp; Trademark Office. U.S. patent law is also described on the USPTO Web site in this PDF file. Google&#39;s reply cites sections 101, 102, 103, and 112.