And because most patent license agreements are confidential, there is little or no information or "comps" on what others have paid for similar patent rights.
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The court of choice for most patent trolls is the Eastern District Court of Texas (EDTX), which has been the number one venue for patent litigation for nearly a decade.
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Still, as with most patent applications, this could just be Apple covering its bases, and this particular lens strategy may have no eventual bearing on whatever device the company does end up producing.
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As with most patent applications, this in no way guarantees that Snapchat's parent company Snap (still called Snapchat at the date of filing) is working on any of these systems or that it's building augmented reality glasses.
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Most patent suits are brought by non-practicing entities (NPEs) or patent trolls --whose sole purpose is to buy up dozens, hundreds, or thousands of low quality patents on the cheap in hopes of leveraging one or two into a hugely profitable settlement.
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The busiest patent litigation court is the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, with the most patent lawsuits filed there nearly every year.
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In most patent laws, an (alleged) invention must be new and inventive (or non-obvious, which is basically synonymous of inventive) to be considered patentable, i.e., to be validly patented. An invention is considered new if it does not form part of the prior art (or state of the art), i.e., if it was not already disclosed in the prior art.
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Double patenting is the granting of two patents for a single invention, to the same proprietor and in the same country or countries. According to the European Patent Office, it is an accepted principle in most patent systems that two patents cannot be granted to the same applicant for one invention.: "Double patenting". However, the threshold for double patenting varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.
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Patent analysis is a family of techniques and tools for studying the information present within and attached to patents, a major form of intellectual property. Although this has traditionally been done using spreadsheet-based data analysis methods, the field of intellectual property has witnessed a surge in the availability of software-based patent analysis and patent visualisation tools. The cost structure of most patent analysis tools varies from freemium business models to annual subscriptions.
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Demonstrative evidence is an effective aid in infringement litigation. Whether prosecuting an infringer or defending a patent, originally filled patent drawings which are a part of most patent applications, can play an imperative part in any upcoming litigation. If the original patent drawings are not complete, accurate and exact, then the resulting output for litigation graphics is unreliable and could even hurt a case. There are many ways to convert patent drawings into effective litigation graphics.
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Jacky begins to market her own patent medicine consisting of an alcoholic tincture of opium (better known as laudanum) and Kentucky bourbon, which she markets during medicine shows. Most patent medicines of the time were made up with similar ingredients and similar lavish claims for their efficacy. Use of these compounds was widespread and unregulated. The crew encounter a secret abolitionist running a slave-selling scam in which the "slave" is sold, and then escapes to be sold again and again.
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The inventive step and non-obviousness reflect a general patentability requirement present in most patent laws, according to which an invention should be sufficiently inventive—i.e., non-obvious—in order to be patented. In other words, "[the] nonobviousness principle asks whether the invention is an adequate distance beyond or above the state of the art".Barton, John H. (2003) The expression "inventive step" is predominantly used in Europe, while the expression "non-obviousness" is predominantly used in United States patent law.
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The term of a patent is the maximum time during which it can be maintained in force. It is usually expressed in a number of years either starting from the filing date of the patent application or from the date of grant of the patent. In most patent laws, annuities or maintenance fees have to be regularly paid in order to keep the patent in force. Thus, a patent may lapse before its term if a renewal fee is not paid in due time.
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In most patent laws, unity of invention is a formal administrative requirement that must be met by a patent application to become a granted patent. Basically, a patent application can relate only to one invention or a group of closely related inventions. The purpose of this requirement is administrative, as well as financial. That is, the requirement serves to preclude the option of filing one patent application for several inventions, while paying only one set of fees (filing fee, search fee, examination fee, renewal fees, and so on).
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European patent applications are prosecuted in a similar fashion to most patent systems – the invention is searched and published, and subsequently examined for compliance with the requirements of the EPC. During the prosecution phase, a European patent is a single regional proceeding, and "the grant of a European patent may be requested for one or more of the Contracting States." All Contracting States are considered designated upon filing of a European patent application. and the designations need to be "confirmed" later during the procedure through the payment of designation fees.
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According to the Encyclopedia of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity, the denial of Armenian genocide is "the most patent example of a state's denial of its past". Historians mark that "the genocide of the Armenians has been denied to this day by successive Turkish governments, with the exception of the short-lived imperial government that existed between the end of World War I and the ascendance of the Kemalist nationalist regime in the early 1920s."Rae. State Identities and the Homogenisation, p. 127. To deny the Armenian genocide "is like Holocaust denial, " notes Gregory Stanton, vice president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars and president of Genocide Watch.
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Significant international harmonization of patent term across national laws was provided in the 1990s by the implementation of the WTO's Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs Agreement). Article 33 of the TRIPs Agreement provides that :"The term of protection available [for patents] shall not end before the expiration of a period of twenty years counted from the filing date." Consequently, in most patent laws nowadays, the term of patent is 20 years from the filing date of the application. This however does not forbid the states party to the WTO from providing, in their national law, other type of patent-like rights with shorter terms.
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The Eastern District of Texas was considered to be favorable to plaintiffs: trials were resolved quickly and plaintiffs prevailed in 75% of cases. The speedy resolution of cases was in part due to procedures set up by Judge T. John Ward, appointed to the court in 1999, that kept patent infringement cases to a strict time table. In 2017, the Eastern District of Texas saw the most patent infringement cases of any district court, with one judge overseeing 25% of all such cases in the nation. The United States District Court for the District of Delaware also sees a large number of such cases, partly because of the many businesses incorporated in Delaware.
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Most patent applications have at least two components, including a general, written description of the invention and at least one "embodiment" thereof, and a set of "claims," written in a special style that defines exactly what the applicant regards as the particular features of his or her invention. These claims are used to distinguish the invention from the existing prior art, and are compared by the patent office to the prior art before issuing a patent. Patent applications in most jurisdictions also usually include (and may be required to include) a drawing or set of drawings, to facilitate the understanding of the invention. In some jurisdictions, patent models may also be submitted to demonstrate the operation of the invention.
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A patent specification is a document describing the invention for which a patent is sought and setting out the scope of the protection of the patent. As such, a specification generally contains a section detailing the background and overview of the invention, a description of the invention and embodiments of the invention and claims, which set out the scope of the protection. A specification may include figures to aid the description of the invention, gene sequences and references to biological deposits, or computer code, depending upon the subject matter of the application. Most patent offices also require that the application includes an abstract which provides a summary of the invention to aid searching.
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In some patent laws, the person skilled in the art is also used as a reference in the context of other criteria, for instance in order to determine whether an invention is sufficiently disclosed in the description of the patent or patent application (sufficiency of disclosure is a fundamental requirement in most patent laws), or in order to determine whether two technical means are equivalents when evaluating infringement (see also doctrine of equivalents). In practice, this legal fiction is a set of legal fictions which evolved over time and which may be differently construed for different purposes. This legal fiction basically translates the need for each invention to be considered in the context of the technical field it belongs to.
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In the pharmaceutical industry patents are typically granted for a 20-year period of time, and most patent applications are submitted during the early stages of the product development. According to Ariel Katz on average after a patent application is submitted it takes an additional 8 years before the FDA approves a drug for marketing. As such this would leave a company with only 12 years to market the drug to see a return on their investments. After a sharp decline of new drugs entering the US market following the 1962 Kefauver-Harris amendments economist Sam Petlzman concluded that cost of loss of innovation was greater than the savings recognized by consumers no longer purchasing ineffective drugs. In 1984 the Hatch-Waxman Act or the Drug Price Competition and Patent Term Restoration Act of 1984 was passed by congress.
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The Eastern District of Texas currently hears the most patent cases in the country and has seen an increase in the number of cases filed relating to patent infringement, notably in the courts of Judge T. John Ward in the Marshall Division, Judge Leonard Davis in the Tyler Division, and Judge David Folsom in the Texarkana Division and now Judge J. Rodney Gilstrap in the Marshall Division and Judge Robert W. Schroeder III in the Texarkana Division, as well as Magistrate Judges Roy S. Payne, John Love and K. Nicole Mitchell. Perhaps because the district has a set of local rules for patent cases and relatively fast trial settings, patent plaintiffs have flocked to this small venue. In addition the proximity to larger cities (such as Dallas and Houston), along with a jury pool interested in protecting property rights, may attract patent cases to Marshall, Tyler, and Texarkana. In 2003, there were 14 patent cases filed.
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Among the most prestigious clerkships are those with the United States Supreme Court, the United States courts of appeals, certain United States district courts, specialized courts such as the United States Tax Court and the United States Bankruptcy Courts, the New York State Commercial Division, Delaware Court of Chancery, and state supreme courts. Some U.S. district courts provide particularly useful experience for law clerks pursuing specific fields. The Southern District of New York deals with a heightened volume of high-profile commercial litigation, the Eastern District of Texas handles the most patent cases in the nation, the Northern District of California leads the country in antitrust suits, and the District of Columbia hears many high-profile disputes involving the federal government. Similarly, the United States Tax Court specializes in adjudicating disputes over federal income tax, the United States Bankruptcy Courts specialize and often influence issues arising under the United States Bankruptcy Code, the New York State Commercial Division adjudicates high-profile commercial matters in an expedited fashion, and the Delaware Court of Chancery hears a substantial volume of corporate and shareholder derivative actions.
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Considerations Relevant to Best Mode MPEP 2165.01 That nondisclosed information will often increase the commercial viability of the patent. Most patent licenses include clauses that require the inventor to disclose any trade secrets they have, and patent licensors must be careful to maintain their trade secrets while licensing a patent through such means as the use of a non-disclosure agreement. Compared to patents, the advantages of trade secrets are that a trade secret is not limited in time (it "continues indefinitely as long as the secret is not revealed to the public", whereas a patent is only in force for a specified time, after which others may freely copy the invention), a trade secret does not imply any registration costs, has an immediate effect, does not require compliance with any formalities, and does not imply any disclosure of the invention to the public. The disadvantages of trade secrets include that "others may be able to legally discover the secret and be thereafter entitled to use it", "others may obtain patent protection for legally discovered secrets", and a trade secret is more difficult to enforce than a patent.
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