PODCAST: Williams Mullen's Trending Now: An IP Podcast - Patent Searching
Blockchain is becoming central to more FinTech patent portfolios than ever – but it’s harder to obtain protection on blockchain than most other technologies. The US Supreme Court’s decision in Alice v. CLS Bank (2014)...more
The US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has published a request for comment (RFC) on “how AI could affect evaluations of how the level of ordinary skills in the arts are made to determine if an invention is patentable...more
A patent does not give the owner the right to do anything. Rather, it gives the patent owner the right to exclude others from making, using, selling, offering to sell, and/or importing the claimed invention, which most...more
On October 10, 2023, the Enlarged Board of Appeal of the European Patent Office (EPO) issued a groundbreaking decision that reflects a major change in how formal priority is assessed at the EPO during examination and in...more
A “picture” claim refers to a patent claim precisely tailored to track a particular product’s important advantages and features. When drafting a patent application, one should describe various embodiments of the invention and...more
If you’ve ever applied for a utility patent before, you’re probably familiar with the three primary considerations that dictate whether you can obtain a patent or not: usefulness, novelty, and non-obviousness. With only three...more
For many start-up companies, the prospect of filing a patent application can be daunting. Even when a company has a potentially patentable invention, the company may be unsure about what materials it should compile before...more
A patentability search (also referred to as a novelty search) is an attempt to identify relevant prior art and analyze those results to inform an inventor or business the intellectual property is to be assigned to and whether...more
On the latest episode of Williams Mullen's Trending Now - An IP Podcast, Tom Bergert and Clint Brannon discuss whether a patentability search or freedom to operate search is needed in order to manage my business risks. ...more
Associate Tom Cowan presented "Patent Basics for the Aerospace Industry," at the Space Foundation Space Commerce Workshop at the Aerospace Corporation in El Segundo, California. As the keynote speaker for the event, Tom...more
When does a prior art disclosure of a concentration range of a medicament render obvious the use of a species that falls within that range, when that same use was also known in the prior art? After all, common sense should...more