Quicker, cheaper solutions needed for patent law
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A further possibility, which is being trialled in the US in relation to software patents, is to expose patent applications to comment from those in industry. This would enable interested players to draw prior art to the attention of the examiner, and potentially also to identify ambiguity or lack of clarity. This would presumably assist examiners greatly in dealing with complex and new technologies.
The second major protection for the system is to ensure that those who wish to challenge the validity of a patent have access to a cost-effective dispute resolution mechanism. Typically, running a hotly contested patent case in the Federal Court can cost upwards of $2 million and take over a year to get to trial. On this basis, smaller players and issues that affect smaller markets will be shut out.
How to Attract Patent Litigation
If you’re a federal district court, that is.
The answer? You need something not every federal district has. The Eastern and Southern Districts of Texas have them. The Northern District of California has them. The Districts of Pennsylvania (Western), Georgia (Northern) and Illinois (Northern) have them. In fact, so many U.S. District Courts have them that its getting difficult to keep up. Like so many things in life, at first its an advantage to have them, and eventually it becomes necessity.
Except for the few patent holders and Accenture, the tax strategy business community has been largely anti-patent – going so far as to lobby congress to introduce legislation to create a specific exception that would block enforcement of those patents.
Judge Ronald M. Whyte of the US District Court, Northern District of California in San Jose, who has already presided over other cases involving Rambus and Hynix, has now reached a number of decisions, which were preceded by a legally and technically interesting 42-page set of findings. According to the court findings, DDR2, DDR3, GDDR2, and GDDR4 SDRAM chips made by Hynix, Micron, Nanya and Samsung infringe claim 16 of Rambus patent 6,266,285, granted on July 24, 2001; where GDDR3 memory is concerned, only Hynix, Micron and Samsung are affected. Rambus had also filed complaints over patent infringements related to nine further US patents, but Judge Whyte denied them for the most part.
The Commission said it had found documents during the inquiry, which contained admissions from brand-name companies that they had tried to stop generics, and many examples of obstacles being placed in way of less-expensive competitors.
The inquiry has revived calls for the creation of a single European Union patent, an issue that regulators have struggled with for 30 years due to disagreements over the languages used. Kroes said that the preliminary findings of the sector inquiry supported the case for a community patent, which she argued could help avoid litigation and cut costs.
BABIES with a severe form of epilepsy risk having their diagnosis delayed and their treatment compromised because of a company's patent on a key gene.
It is the first evidence that private intellectual property rights over human DNA are adversely affecting medical care.