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WASHINGTON - B vitamin deficiencies can cause a range of serious health effects, including spinal defects in children born to women with below-normal levels of folic acid and anemia in people not getting enough B12. That‘s why a two-step method of diagnosing those deficiencies that three medical school doctors patented in 1990 has become so widely used. It‘s performed tens of millions of times a year, at a cost of just a dollar or two, by laboratory testing companies nationwide. Even more surprising is that the Supreme Court may dredge up a bombshell question not asked when the lower...

Richmond, Va. -- The U.S. patent office on Wednesday issued its first of several anticipated final rejections of patents held by NTP Inc. related to Research In Motion Ltd.'s BlackBerry device, two days before a judge will hear arguments on an injunction on the wireless e-mail service. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is expected to issue final rejections of four other patents at the heart of the court case, but it's unclear when those actions could come. Another uncertainty is whether the agency's act will sway U.S. District Judge James R. Spencer, who has made it clear he is...

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) has issued a non-final rejection of a fifth patent in NTP’s lawsuit against Research In Motion (RIM), according to a lawyer for NTP, Reuters reports. Research In Motion is the maker of the popular BlackBerry handheld, and the case could lead to a shutdown of RIM’s U.S. sales and services. The PTO has currently issued non-final rejections of all five patents in the BlackBerry infringement case, currently pending before a federal judge, the article says. James Wallace, an NTP attorney, said the company has the opportunity to respond within 30 days, after which...

The Korea Chamber of Commerce and Industry warned that the technology gap between China and Korea has been narrowing and the technology leakage to China is at a level for concern. The technology difference between the two countries was found to be 4.6 years. The National Intelligence Service through its Web site said that industrial spies are bustling around Korea. Korea is stuck between Japan and China, and it can survive and prosper if only it succeeds in competiting both in technology and price at the same time. Hu Jintao, China's president, announced during the country's National Science and Technology...

A SEA CHANGE IN PATENT LAW Proposed Legislation Would Wean the United States from a 'First to Invent' Approval System BY STEVE SEIDENBERG Gordon Gould was still a graduate student in physics at Columbia University when he made his breakthrough in November 1957. He developed a way to use beams of light to perform an array of tasks. A half-century later, Gould’s invention is integral to the technology revolution—it can be used to perform delicate eye surgery without harming vision, it translates the digital messages on CDs and DVDs, it reads barcodes, and it helps make high-speed data communications possible....

IBM is expected to announce Tuesday that it won more U.S. patents than any other company and that it will participate in three initiatives to improve patent quality. For the thirteenth consecutive year, IBM was awarded the most patents--more than 2,900--by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, according to the company. IBM is also expected to detail three multiparty efforts to increase review of patent applications, in part by tapping open-source developers and collaborative software. Partners include the Patent Office and the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL), an industry consortium that launched a "patent commons" for open-source communities in November...

The order was potentially a big one for KSR International Co. General Motors Corp. (GM) wanted the Canadian auto parts maker to supply gas pedals for its 2003 Chevrolet and GMC light trucks and sport-utility vehicles. But not just any pedals. GM wanted adjustable ones that could move back and forth to accommodate drivers of different heights. And it wanted the pedals to send an electronic signal, rather than using a mechanical cable, to change the engine speed when a driver stepped on or off the accelerator.

The BlackBerry service, based on the handheld e-mail device that has become a must-have tool for the business elite, could be shutdown in the United States after a bitter legal battle over a key patent. This week, NTP, a small firm that holds a crucial patent that allows e-mails to be sent to mobile devices, announced a licence agreement with Visto Corp - an arch-rival of Research In Motion. (RIM), the company that created the BlackBerry. The announcement could put further pressure on RIM to settle a patent claim from NTP which could be worth up to $1 billion (£565...

TORONTO, Dec. 9 (Reuters) - The patent holding company NTP Inc. has rejected an offer by Research In Motion, maker of the BlackBerry e-mail device, to settle their patent dispute and the two sides are not currently negotiating, NTP's co-founder, Don Stout, said Friday. Mr. Stout said Research In Motion had made an "unacceptable" written offer Thursday to settle their patent infringement case, a lawsuit that could shut down the popular BlackBerry e-mail service in the United States. "They have responded yesterday in a manner which is unacceptable so we're not negotiating," Mr. Stout said. Research In Motion did not...

TORONTO -- NTP Inc. would settle its longstanding patent-infringement dispute with Research In Motion Ltd. for a payment equal to 5.7% of RIM's future U.S. BlackBerry revenue, according to a person familiar with the situation. It's not clear what amount such a royalty would represent, though it would likely be at least several hundreds of millions of dollars. NTP's patents last until 2012. RIM's revenue in the latest quarter was $490.1 million, and most of its BlackBerry subscribers are in the U.S. Walterloo, Ontario-based RIM and NTP, a Virginia patent holding firm, in March had announced a preliminary settlement in...

In October 2004, enterpreneur Rocco Monteleone started a cereal bar called Bowls in Gainesville, Florida. Located in a college town with no other cereal bars, Bowls appeared likely to be a successful venture. However, recently cereal bar chain Cereality (which has no locations in Florida) threatened Bowls with lawsuits should Bowls tread on Cereality's turf. Cereality has patents pending to give them an exclusive right to six business methods, including "displaying and mixing competitively branded food products" and adding "a third portion of liquid." If these patents are approved by the U.S. Patent Office, Cereality would have a complete monopoly...

CHICAGO, Nov. 30 (UPI) -- The U.S. Supreme Court's decision this week to review a lower-court decision involving eBay and an injunction for patent infringement revives the patent agenda pushed earlier this year by the software industry, a reform program that failed to make any headway through the Congress, legal experts tell United Press International's The Web. The case, eBay vs. MercExchange, comes from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. The court had held that, barring exceptional circumstances, a district court should issue a permanent injunction after finding that a patent was infringed. By Gene Koprowski

It certainly looks like a joke, but the patent can be found by the search engine on the US Patent Office site.

CHICAGO, Nov. 14 (UPI) -- The feds are intervening in a 5-year-old patent case against Research in Motion Ltd., the Canadian-based developer of BlackBerry, arguing in court papers filed last week that the networked wireless computing devices are essential and a network outage could cause severe problems for the U.S. government. "The injunction would, literally, prevent RIM from providing the services that would be essential for the federal government, as well as state and local governments, to continue their use of the BlackBerry devices," the U.S. Department of Justice argued in a court filing. By Gene Koprowski

Get breaking Internet news straight to your desktop - click here to find out how Amazon.com has been granted three detailed patents covering purchase circles, consumer reviews, and search results in the form of products from multiple product categories. It's a sweeping landgrab which puts e-commerce rivals on the alert. The techniques granted to Amazon.com by the patent office are already ubiquitous on commercial and social networking web sites. Patent 6,963,848 filed March 2, 2000 and granted November 8, covers "Methods and system of obtaining consumer reviews". Patent 6,963,867, filed on March 31, 2003, covers "Search query processing to provide...

WASHINGTON, Nov. 9 (UPI) -- The U.S. patent office has reportedly granted a patent for an anti-gravity device -- breaking its rule to reject inventions that defy the laws of physics. The journal Nature said patent 6,960,975 was granted Nov. 1 to Boris Volfson of Huntington, Ind., for a space vehicle propelled by a superconducting shield that alters the curvature of space-time outside the craft in a way that counteracts gravity. One of the main theoretical arguments against anti-gravity is that it implies the availability of unlimited energy. "If you design an anti-gravity machine, you've got a perpetual-motion machine," Robert...

Sony is in trouble but we might be the ones who lose out in the end, says technology commentator Bill Thompson. Sony says it has been using XCP for months Sony BMG, the record company part of the multinational corporation that makes laptops, TVs, movies and many other things, is in trouble this week thanks to a copy protection scheme it has used on a number of its CDs. The software, called Extended Copy Protection or XCP, hides itself on your hard drive using techniques normally reserved for viruses, worms and trojans, which use similar "rootkits" to evade detection. And...

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office will publish history’s first “storyline patent” application today from an application filed in November, 2003. Inventor Andrew Knight will assert publication-based provisional patent rights against the entertainment industry. Falls Church, Virginia (PRWEB) November 3, 2005 -- Further to a policy of publishing patent applications eighteen months after filing, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is scheduled to publish history’s first “storyline patent” application today. The publication will be based on a utility patent application filed by Andrew Knight in November, 2003, the first such application to claim a fictional storyline. Knight, a rocket engine...

The U.S. Patent Office has rejected two Microsoft patents over the FAT file format, but the software maker said Wednesday that it's not ready to give up its battle to protect its widely used method for storing data. The patent office delivered its ruling late last month but made it public this week. With one of the patents, the decision is what's considered a final rejection, while with another it's considered nonfinal. In both cases, Microsoft has the ability to pursue its claims further. The rejections come after a re-examination of the patents was sought by the Public Patent Foundation,...

OSDL has announced a patent commons project. This is a huge step legally. Eben Moglen is encouraging everyone to support the project: "OSDL is the ideal steward for such an important legal initiative as the patent commons project," said Eben Moglen, chair of the Software Freedom Law Center. "No matter what your stand on software patents, and I oppose them, I call on developers to contribute to the OSDL patent commons project because there is strength in numbers and when individual contributions are collected together it creates a protective haven where developers can innovate without fear." More details on Business...

p2pnet.net News:- For the moment, it seems the technology behind Apple’s menu-based software iPod interface is virtually open source. “The company's patent application, which lists Apple vice president Jeff Robbin and Apple chief executive Steve Jobs as two of its primary inventors, received a final rejection last month from the United States Patent and Trademark Office,” says AppleInsider. “Standing in Apple's way appears to be a prior filing by inventor John Platt, who submitted a patent application for a similar software design for a portable device in May of 2002 - just five months before Robbin submitted his claims on...

Russia plans to call in the support of the United Nations in its battle to regain leadership of the small arms market, a Foreign Ministry official said Wednesday. In a move to tackle unlicensed manufacturing of arms including its best selling Kalashnikov assault rifle, Russia wants to have its intellectual property rights on small arms recognized under a UN initiative against illicit trade in small weapons. "We are against countries making small arms that were designed in Russia without our permission," Pyotr Litavrin, deputy head of security and disarmament at the Foreign Ministry, told reporters. Russia, which in Soviet times...

GENEVA - Most Americans have probably never heard of the World Intellectual Property Organization, headquartered here in Switzerland. Intellectual property is intangible property, such as software or music. Its value is very real. According to a study by Leonard Nakamura, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, the total value of intellectual property in the United States is more than $5 trillion. That's more than a third of the value of the U.S. stock markets. Protected only by copyrights and patents, it is relatively easy to steal or counterfeit. (snip) WIPO and other international bodies are meeting to...

Abstract The present invention is directed at a system and process for allowing a user to treat email addresses as objects. This allows easy manipulation of the email addresses, such as allowing them to be added to a contact list, copied to the computer's clipboard, or double-clicked to open the related contact information for that email address sender. Email addresses are treated as objects in the message preview pane and full message windows of both incoming and outgoing email messages. A small icon is added to the text of each address. In a preferred embodiment, the icons will vary depending...

IBM has called for tighter regulation of patents and a review of intellectual property ownership issues in collaborative software development. Big Blue -- one of the largest patent-holders in the United States -- detailed its position at a media event in New York last week. Jim Stallings, vice-president, intellectual property and standards, launched an attack on the current patent process, arguing the methods adopted by the United States Patent office are flawed. "There has been a dramatic increase in the number of filings of patents recently, around the world, but particularly in the United States," Stallings said. "What's happened is...

Court Denies Smucker's PB&J Pastry Patent By MALIA RULON Associated Press Writer WASHINGTON (AP) -- There's only so far you can go in trying to patent the ever-popular peanut butter and jelly sandwich. On Friday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit rejected an effort by J.M. Smucker Co. to patent its process for making pocket-size peanut butter and jelly pastries called "Uncrustables." Smucker's peanut butter and jelly pockets are enclosed without a crust using a crimping method that the Orrville, Ohio, company says is one of a kind and should be protected from duplication by federal law....

Three federal judges yesterday questioned whether the method for creating a crustless, peanut butter and jelly sandwich is unique. The hearing, at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, was the latest round in J.M. Smucker Co.'s attempt to expand its patent on Uncrustables, frozen, disk-shaped peanut butter and jelly sandwiches that have been among the Orrville, Ohio, jam-maker's most successful products. The three judges explored the difference between bread that is "smushed" versus "compressed," and pondered the idea of jelly "encapsulated" in peanut butter. One even questioned whether his wife violated Smucker's patent when she made lunch...

Sony patent takes first step towards real-life Matrix* 07 April 2005 * Exclusive from New Scientist Print Edition * Jenny Hogan * Barry Fox IMAGINE movies and computer games in which you get to smell, taste and perhaps even feel things. That's the tantalising prospect raised by a patent on a device for transmitting sensory data directly into the human brain - granted to none other than the entertainment giant Sony. The technique suggested in the patent is entirely non-invasive. It describes a device that fires pulses of ultrasound at the head to modify firing patterns in targeted parts of...

(AP) - TOKYO-Japanese electronics giant Sony Corp.'s video game unit has been ordered to pay $90.7 million in damages to Immersion Corp. over a patent infringement lawsuit related to a controller for Sony's PlayStation consoles, the company said Monday. The Tokyo-based company plans to appeal the decision by the federal district court in Oakland, Calif., a Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. spokesman said on condition of anonymity. In the decision issued Thursday, Sony Computer Entertainment was ordered to pay damages to Immersion Corp., a San Jose, Calif., company which develops and licenses digital technology. In a 2002 lawsuit, Immersion accused Sony...

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - India's government proposed on Friday to change the country's patent laws to make it illegal to copy patented drugs, a practice that has made cheaper medicines available in India and abroad. The bill proposed to parliament, which also covers other products such as chemicals, mobile phones and computers, would fulfil India's commitment to the World Trade Organization to recognize patents from Jan. 1, 2005. But the legislation faces huge resistance from the ruling coalition's communist allies and opposition parties who are concerned about the availability of affordable drugs in India. Domestic pharmaceutical companies and aid organizations...

Friday March 4, 8:46 am ET C-AT's "Incident Commanders' Radio Interface" Addresses #1 Priority for Homeland Security RESTON, Va.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 4, 2005-- The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office awarded a patent for the Incident Commanders' Radio Interface (ICRI(TM)), a portable device developed by Communications-Applied Technology (C-AT) that provides radio interoperability amongst public safety, 1st responders, and military personnel. The ability for emergency responders from different agencies to communicate with one another at the scene of an incident ranked as the top homeland security priority in coming years, according to a survey of state homeland security advisors. The report by the...

Microsoft Corp. on Wednesday said a federal appeals court has overturned a lower-court verdict that found the software giant guilty of infringing on a browser-related technology patent and ordered the company to pay more than $520 million in damages. The appellate court also sent the case back to the U.S. District Court in Chicago, giving Microsoft "the opportunity to tell the jury the whole story of how this technology was developed and present evidence that shows that Eolas (Technologies Inc.) did not invent this technology," the Redmond, Wash., company said in a statement. Microsoft said the ruling was a "clear...

My friend, who has a USA patent on an invention, received the following two emails. It looks too good to be true. Does this look familiar? Is this one step up from the Nigerian scams? Or could this possibly be legit? (Details and names removed) [Name of sender] <[name of sender]@yahoo.com> wrote: Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2005 02:11:08 -0800 (PST) From: [Name of sender] Subject: More Info - [Name of Invention] To: [my friend's email addy] Dear [My friend] My client Mr [Name of client] has been in his family Shipping business, Hotel business, Casino Business and Estate business here...

MPs are fighting the corner of small software developers to clarify a new EU law on patenting that could spell bankruptcy for thousands of independent UK writers. Science Minister Lord Sainsbury has been told by Liberal Democrat IT minister, Richard Allan, that he must clearly spell out the implications of the Directive to allay fears of an innovation shut down. According to the Times, he believes small UK IT writers are entitled to know “how high the hurdle is to get a patent,” because of current proposals tipped in favour of big business. Microsoft has already labelled anyone opposing the...

Okay, FReeps. I have an invention that I want to patent. My questions to those who have filed for a patent are first, did you have any problems doing so, and two, how long did it actually take? Your realistic thoughts are appreciated beforehand.

Well, here we go again with the strange and stupid software patents. Granted I haven't seen this in enough places yet to confirm it but it's so strange that I have to think it's probably true since it concerns a software patent. Article is here. The patent is here. In simple terms it seems to be saying that this patent is for the technique of displaying 3D information on a 2D monitor. Which means in case of this lawsuit nearly every game created in the last five to ten years. But it goes beyond that. FAR BEYOND. Any company that...

NEW YORK - The nasty legal battle between SCO Group and IBM may soon grow wider, as SCO executives have dropped a new bombshell. In private interviews during their annual user conference in Las Vegas this week, SCO executives said they have discovered that IBM lacks proper licenses for its Unix-based AIX operating system, heart of a multibillion-dollar business for IBM. SCO alleges that since 2001, AIX has contained code for which IBM does not have a license. Moreover SCO claims to have found internal IBM e-mails in which IBMers acknowledge this shortcoming.

Press Release Munich, 07/30/2004 - When the city administration of Munich decided to migrate its IT infrastructure to the Linux operating system, it made headline news around the world. That project is now threatened by software patents. In May the EU Council and Commission have reached "political agreement" to legalise software patents and reject all limits of patentability for which the European Parliament had voted in September 2003. Software patents are considered the greatest danger to the usage and development of Linux and other Free Software. A cursory search by FFII revealed that the Linux "base client", which the city...

Burlingame, CA, Jul. 8 (UPI) -- Application for a U.S. patent has been filed by a California man for his system that allows the dead to speak from their tombs, New Scientist reported Thursday. Robert Barrows of Burlingame has devised a hollow headstone fitted with a flat LCD touch screen. It also houses a computer with a hard disc or microchip memory that allows the deceased to speak from the grave through a video message. The tombstone would draw its electricity from the cemetery's lighting system, and as a civil touch, comes with wireless headphones so as not to disturb...

Mad cap patents ranging from protecting a method of painting by dipping a baby's bottom into paint or a system for keeping track of people queuing for the bathroom may soon be a thing of the past if the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has its way. Patent wars are not so much about leaked secrets Such patents, while humorous, clearly show both how broken the American patent system and how lax standards are hurting innovation when it comes to business, the Commission says. "The intellectual property system was designed to create incentives for people to innovate by giving them, for...

Microsoft has recently been making sounds that indicate it will use its patent portfolio to start to extract fees from other companies. A recent example was its use of patents around technology mapping short filenames to long file names, and how Microsoft is licensing this technology to embedded devices company which use FAT on devices such as digital cameras. So what else do Microsoft have in wait for us? How about New Zealand patent 525484 - "Word processing document stored in a single XML file that may be manipulated by applications that understand XML". Filed on the 24th of April...

<p>Technically, Stephen Thaler has written more music than any composer in the world. He also invented the Oral-B CrossAction toothbrush and devices that search the Internet for messages from terrorists. He has discovered substances harder than diamonds, coined 1.5 million new English words, and trained robotic cockroaches. Technically.</p>

Of all the sights he witnessed on an eight-day trip this month through fast-changing China, it was a new subcompact Chevy that gave veteran Congressman F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. the greatest reason to come home feeling disgruntled.Chevrolet designed its zippy Spark solely for domestic Chinese buyers and builds it in its factories on the mainland. But no sooner did the Spark arrive in showrooms last year than a strikingly similar model called the Chery QQ appeared on the nation's crowded streets under the trademark of the rival Shanghai Automotive Industry Corp., an indigenous Chinese automaker. To Sensenbrenner, a Republican from...

United States Patent Application 20040005535 Kind Code A1 Knauer, George III January 8, 2004 Process of reincarnation Abstract The invention consists of the process of reincarnation or rebirth resulting in immortality. Inventors: Knauer, George III; (Naples, FL) Correspondence Name and Address: Merrill N. Johnson 800 Harbour Drive Naples FL 34103 US Serial No.: 035947 Series Code: 10 Filed: July 8, 2002 U.S. Current Class: 434/300 U.S. Class at Publication: 434/300 Intern'l Class: G09B 023/06 Claims I claim: 1. The process of reincarnation or rebirth which results in immortality. Description SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION [0001] This invention resulted from my...

A Chicago federal judge on Wednesday upheld a $512 million patent verdict against Microsoft that could ultimately force major changes in many of the most common Internet software products.

<p>HOPEWELL JUNCTION -- The Islamic symbol of the crescent and star has now been patented.</p> <p>Hopewell Junction attorney Aziz Ahsan and his family took on the task of seeking a patent for the symbol following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Patenting the symbol was Ahsan's attempt to create a positive Muslim identity.</p>

In an unusual move, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is considering whether to revoke a patent that Internet experts claim could hobble Web browsing and online commerce. The office's top patent-examination official has ordered a review of a patent that covers the ability of Web browsers to display multimedia content, the office confirmed on Thursday.PTO Deputy Commissioner Stephen Kunin ordered the review after Internet engineers said the patent did not cover an original invention and would cause massive disruption for Web users, spokeswoman Brigid Quinn said."The director has to have received quite a bit of input from the community"...

YORBA LINDA, Calif. &#8212; Three California brothers were awarded $4.3 million, and stand to win more in punitive damages, after accusing Seattle-based X10 Wireless Technology of trying to bully them out of business. But the brothers, who founded their advertising company when the youngest was still in his teens, say the case is about the cutthroat nature of Internet business, not about money."This lawsuit was about fairness, not about making us rich," said Chris Vanderhook, who created an Internet ad business with his brothers in 1999.Two weeks ago, a Superior Court jury in Santa Ana, Calif., ordered tech company X10...

"SHOCK AND AWE" Barrage Hits US Patent Office WASHINGTON, Oct 23 (Reuters) - From condoms to coffees, a wave of trademark applications using "Shock and Awe" in their names is hitting the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Seven months after the most overused cliche of the Iraq War entered American jargon, a Patent Office official said on Thursday it had received 29 "Shock and Awe" applications. There are filings to trademark golf clubs, pesticides, dietary supplements, video games, salsa, energy drinks, yo-yos, lingerie, Bloody Mary mix and "infant action crib toys." "The last thing I can remember like this was...

Microsoft was granted patent #6,632,248 entitled Customization of network documents by accessing customization information on a server computer using uniquie user identifiers on Tuesday. It appears this patent is for user preferences on servers. For example, when you login to a website or portal application and your user preferences, weather, account information are retrieved. The patent may also apply to cookies. The patent abstract reads: "User-selected customization information for a network (e.g., HTML) document is stored at a server with reference to user identifying information that uniquely identifies the user. Whenever the user navigates back to the network address of...