In June, Prof. Hansen filed an amicus brief in the Supreme Court, which had taken an appeal from the Federal Circuit’s decision in In re: Simon Shiao Tam (April 20, 2015). The case presented the issue of whether the TTAB erred in refusing to register the trademark of Mr. Tam’s band, THE SLANTS, on grounds […]
Recently, courts have invalidated patents for claiming “abstract” ideas or business methods under Section 101 of the patent laws as applied in Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank International, 134 S. Ct. 2347 (2014). The Court reasoned that taking a method that is “abstract” — practiced in the prior art “manually,” without a computer – and just performing […]
From time to time, a firm will retire its logo and replace it with a newer version. This prompted us to wonder: why would a company, whose logo is instantly recognizable, want to make this change? To answer the question, we might have conducted a little informal research, ferreted out the company’s graphic aspirations, […]
When the legal industry hit a wall during the last recession, its reaction was typical of most businesses: laying off workers, postponing new hires, and devising alternative payment structures. Such quick fixes made no one happy, as legal work continued to move in-house and clients demanded services that went unbilled. The situation (“Is Big Law […]
On June 11, 2015, the New York Times reported that a small Chinese company had produced 100 doses of an Ebola drug that closely mirrored a drug patented by a U.S. drug-maker and for which the U.S. government held a patent on one of the constituent antibodies. According to the article, a U.S. government official […]
Participants: Paul England, Taylor & Wessing (Moderator); Johannes Karcher, Head of Task Force, EU-Patent and Unified Patent Court, Federal Ministry of Justice and Consumer Protection, Berlin; Coordinator of the Legal Working Group of the Preparatory Committee for the establishment of the Unified Patent Court (Speaker); Mr. Justice Colin Birss, Chancery Division, High Court, London (Panelist); Sir Robin Jacob, University […]
This session broadly addressed the development of IP law in China, focusing in particular on how Chinese bureaucrats and judges approach “the rule of law”; the difficulties and opportunities faced by Western companies seeking to protect their IP in China; and the strategies of Chinese regulators to create an IP regime consistent with parochial economic […]
