Category Archives: Patent

A decision this week from the Federal Circuit, in a patent invalidity action, has been getting a lot of press for its suggestion that patent (and by implication trademark) holders may be able to avoid challenges to the validity of their IP simply by crafting a website disclaimer explaining that they will not sue certain [...]

 An employer may have rights in a patent on its employee’s invention in three situations: (1)  if there is an express agreement to assign or license the patent to the employer, (2)  if the employee was “hired to invent” and the employer can show an implied contract to assign the patent rights in the invention, [...]

An often-frustrating aspect of IP law is that in relatively small matters, the cost of litigation can quickly become disproportionate to the value of the intellectual property in dispute. In other words, there is no automatic sliding scale of expenses that shifts according to the value of the IP. That may be changing in the [...]

A recent Federal Circuit decision discussing the effect of an Employee Intellectual Property Assignment Agreement upon the ownership of inventions made by the employee (Preston v. Marathon Oil Co., Nos. 2011-1013, -1026 (Fed. Cir. July 10, 2012) (decision here)) offers a number of practice pointers. Marathon Oil had filed suit against Preston, its former employee, [...]

On November 17, 2011, Senators Scott Brown and John Kerry sent a letter to David Kappos, the Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office, urging him to consider Massachusetts as a location for one of the satellite patent offices that was authorized under the recently [...]