Free Republic

In a mad scramble to shore up the senior vote before November's election, President Trump recently signed an executive order that would drop Medicare payments for many prescription medicines to the lowest price paid in other developed nations. Given the haste with which the president crammed through this plan, it should come as no surprise that the policy is myopic at best and downright reckless at worst. Yes, foreign governments pay less for drugs than we do in the United States. But President Trump fails to consider exactly why prices are lower overseas. Many other countries unilaterally dictate how much...

Defendant Stole Google’s Confidential Information on Self-Driving Car Technology SAN FRANCISCO – Anthony Scott Levandowski pleaded guilty and was sentenced today to 18 months in prison for trade secret theft related to Google’s self-driving car program, announced United States Attorney David L. Anderson and John F. Bennett, Special Agent in Charge of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.  Levandowski was also ordered to pay a $95,000 fine and $756,499.22 in restitution. As part of a plea agreement, Levandowski, 40, of Marin County, pleaded guilty to one of the 33 counts of trade secrets theft originally filed against him in 2019.  In...

SAFEGUARDING NATIONAL SECURITY: President Donald J. Trump is dismantling China’s ability to use graduate students to steal intellectual property and technology from the United States. President Trump has issued a proclamation to block certain graduate level and above Chinese nationals associated with entities in China that implement or support China’s Military-Civil Fusion (MCF) strategy, from using F or J visas to enter the United States.China’s theft of American technology, intellectual property, and research threatens the safety, security, and economy of the United States.Today’s actions will not affect students who come to the United States for legitimate reasons. Affected students...

Our Nation’s history is defined by discovery, ingenuity, and innovation. Americans are known for their resourcefulness and ability to find solutions to a wide range of challenges, including the development of technologies that advance our security, health, and prosperity. This resourcefulness has been a driving force of economic growth and human development since the founding of our Nation, and our future depends on the continued protection of our intellectual property. On World Intellectual Property Day, we renew our resolve to protect and secure the works and innovations of American artists, inventors, and other creators who continually push the boundaries of...

We find ourselves at a fascinating—and perhaps terrifying, moment in history in which so much of the past seems irrelevant to answering the questions about our future. How to define misinformation from information. How to allocate accountability for guarding against harmful materials. How to balance individual freedom with responsibility. How to safeguard and promote the creation of original materials in an environment celebrated for disruption and the idea it’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission. It is no fluke that it is within this broader set of entanglements that the Supreme Court is set to take up arguments in...

In an amicus brief filed with the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday, the ABA says: “Imposing governmental attorneys’ fees on patent applicants who choose civil actions under [the law] will hamper equal access to justice and chill the assertion of meritorious claims.” The Supreme Court is considering in Peter v. NantKwest Inc. whether the phrase “all the expenses of the proceedings” in a provision of U.S. patent law includes expenses incurred by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office when its attorneys defend the office in litigation

According to NBC News, the Justice Department filed a friend of court brief late Thursday supporting LED ZEPPELIN in the "Stairway To Heaven" copyright lawsuit. Last September, a federal appeals court decided unanimously to overturn a jury's decision that LED ZEPPELIN's 1971 classic was not a rip-off of SPIRIT's song. Michael Skidmore, the trustee of "Taurus" songwriter Randy "California" Wolfe's estate, had brought the claims more than four decades after "Stairway To Heaven" appeared on LED ZEPPELIN's untitled album, better known as "Led Zeppelin IV". In its brief filed Thursday, the Justice Department said the trial judge got it right...

Genius.com, a site specialising in providing song lyrics, had suspected that Google had been scraping its site and using the lyrics to populate the 'information panels' often seen in the side of search results. This isn't that uncommon, but usually Google credits the source; in this case, Genius was getting no credit. Sure enough, Google pulled the lyric through and repeated the message, without ever knowing that's what it had done. But Genius wasn't going to take that lying down. The company wanted to prove that Google was indeed sourcing uncredited, and set about proving it by matching high tech...

“Real estate brokers and agents invest resources into obtaining property listings,” wrote NAR, which counts 1.3 million real estate agents as members. As such, NAR said agents have “rights and responsibilities to control the distribution of their listings.” Any “appropriation of a commercial entity’s data, work product, or intellectual property for exploitation by another commercial entity is not justified,” NAR added. But while Zillow argued for the “democratization” of data, NAR said calls for greater access to MLS data are “based on faulty expectations that unrestricted access to listing data will help consumers.” Instead, NAR said, “forcing brokers to provide...

The case concerns the name of an Asian-American rock band: The Slants. And surely Taft never read a friend-of-the-court brief as amusing as one filed in this case. It is titled “Brief of the Cato Institute and a Basket of Deplorable People and Organizations.” The US Patent and Trademark Office is empowered, by the so-called “disparagement clause” of a 1946 law, to protect American sensitivities by denying trademark protection to “immoral, deceptive or scandalous” trademarks. These have included those that a substantial portion of a particular group perceive as disparaging that group — an ethnic, religious, national or other cohort....

Once a haven for innovation, over the last two decades the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has been rocked by the velocity of technological change and roiled by "patent trolls." Could it be that the biggest impediment that innovators now face is the very system that was created to protect them? Starting in the early 2000s, the rights and protections conferred by a U.S. patent have eroded to the point that they are weaker today than at any time since the Great Depression. A series of Supreme Court decisions and then the most important patent-reform legislation in sixty years, signed...

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFtm1MTBC3E Target: The Corrupters! aired on ABC from September 29, 1961 to June 8, 1962. The Target store brand was an early 1960s outgrowth of a parent company that owned both B. Dalton and Pickwick booksellers. There appears never to have been any legal dispute about the use of the program title "Target: The Corrupters!" or the logo of a dark bullseye on a white background.

A Supreme Court order issued today closes the book on (or perhaps merely ends this chapter of) more than a decade of legal warfare between Google and the Authors Guild over the legality of the former’s scanning without permission of millions of copyrighted books. And the final word is: it’s fair use. The order is just an item in a long list of other orders that appeared today, and adds nothing to the argument except the tacit approval of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals 2015 decision — itself approving an even earlier decision, that of the U.S. District Court...

US Patent Office Grants 'Photography Against A White Background' Patent To Amazon from the maybe-someone-at-the-office-checked-the-wrong-box? dept The US Patent and Trademark Office is frequently maligned for its baffling/terrible decisions... and rightfully so. Because this is exactly the sort of thing for which the USPTO should be maligned. Udi Tirosh at DIY Photography has uncovered a recently granted patent for the previously-unheard of process of photographing things/people against a white backdrop... to of all companies, Amazon. I am not really sure how to tag this other than a big #fail for the USPTO, or a huge Kudos for Amazon's IP attorneys....

In 1853, the Supreme Court gave Samuel Morse some bad news. In O'Reilly v. Morse, the justices approved the inventor's patent for part of the telegraph that delivered the Morse code message "What Hath God Wrought?" but said he could not patent the idea of sending messages electronically across great distances. Ideas alone, the justices said, cannot be patented. Morse's descendants should demand a rehearing. The standards for patents are so low that simply having an idea often justifies a patent. Morse wanted a patent to cover "electro-magnetism, however developed, for marking or printing intelligible characters, signs, letters, at any...

While everyone else is left scratching their heads, Amazon and its lawyers are patting themselves on the back. The company has managed to (re)confirm a patent for 1-Click, a method of buying stuff online with, you guessed it, just one click. And that's it, that's all there is to it. If you deploy a system that enables customers to purchase anything online just by pressing one button, you will be infringing on Amazon's patent. It has been a long battle for Amazon, which has been pursuing this patent for more than a decade now. It was initially granted the patent,...

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...

James E. Rogan, who represented parts of the San Fernando Valley in Congress before losing in one of the most expensive House races in history, announced Tuesday he will leave his Commerce Department post and return to Southern California. Rogan has served as the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office undersecretary since 2001. He intends to leave Jan. 9, but said he does not know where in Southern California he will live. In a telephone interview Tuesday, Rogan -- who represented a Burbank-Pasadena district for two terms -- said he plans to complete his autobiography, "Rough Edges," about "what it was...