THE QUALITY of patents granted at the EPO is declining sharply (EPO insiders say so), whereas many patents granted by the USPTO are nowadays being invalidated (while many applications are also being denied). Will the patent microcosm ever learn? It's overusing and misusing the patent system, apparently 'buying' examiners in pursuit of these nefarious goals.
Heredity is so hot right now. In 2017, the number of people who who’ve had their DNA analyzed for the purposes of tracing their genealogy doubled to more than 15 million. The largest of these direct-to-consumer companies, Utah-based Ancestry, tested two million people in the last four months of 2017 alone. But that’s still just a tiny fraction of the world’s population. Which means there are a lot more people out there who could be tested, and the company that woos them can use their valuable data to do other kinds of research and product development. There’s a lot more than just spit at stake.
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The patent in dispute describes a method of analyzing regions of the genome shared by family members—dubbed “identical by descent,” or IBDs. The further back in time you go, the shorter and more spread out the long idententical stretches become. And that happens in a mathematically predictable way; IBD levels decay exponentially with each generation. Which means you can pretty easily determine how related two people are just by calculating the sum of the lengths of every IBD they share and the percentage of shared DNA in each one.
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“This is a super ubiquitous technique that’s been around for a long time,” says Alicia R. Martin, a genetics researcher at the Broad Institute. She just published a study using IBDs to reconstruct how population size and disease rates in Finland changed over generations. “In fact, as more large-scale databases of genotypes and phenotypes are becoming available, it’s having a bit of a resurgence.”
I construct a measure of patent novelty based on linguistic analysis of claim text. Specifically, I employ advanced computational linguistic techniques to analyze the claims of all U.S. patents issued from 1976-2014, nearly 5 million patents in total. I use the resulting model to measure the similarity of each patented invention to all others in its technology-temporal cohort. Then, I validate the resulting measure using multiple established proxies for novelty, as well as actual USPTO Office Action rejections on grounds of lack of novelty or obviousness. I also analyze a set of pioneering patents and find that they have substantially and significantly higher novelty measures than other patents.
Carmakers including Renault, Jaguar Land Rover and Peugeot have boosted revenues by over $1 billion in the past decade by using sophisticated pricing software, according to sales presentations prepared by the software vendor, Accenture, and other documents filed in a court case.
The software works, Accenture told prospective clients, by identifying which spare parts in a manufacturer's range customers would be content to pay more for, how much to raise prices by and which prices should not be hiked.
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France's competition regulator said it had examined the software and did not see a reason to open a full anti-trust investigation, without explaining its thinking.
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The software categorizes components as those "with or without 3rd party pricing supervision" -- prices monitored by specialist publications or insurers -- according to three client presentations seen by Reuters.
For example, in France, Securite Reparation Automobile (SRA), a group backed by insurers, measures car parts inflation and publishes this in the hope it will help exert downward pressure on parts inflation.
When you think of 3D printing, images of space-age shapes and maybe even a man named Chuck Hull get conjured up. Hull: the man widely dubbed as ‘the father of 3D printing.’ It’s true Hull - now 75 and still working as chief technology officer of 3D Systems - did patent a 3D invention in 1986, but two years earlier in the heat and humidity of Greenville, SC, the idea had already been born by Bill Masters.
Masters, who still resides in South Carolina, is widely known as the father of modern kayaking, founding and running Perception Kayaks from 1975 to 1998. It was on the banks of a kayaking trip that Masters began thinking about spitballs, of all things, that eventually led to 3D printing.
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“I knew in my head and heart that 3D technology could transform the way we make things when I came up with it,” said Masters. “At that time, people in South Carolina looked at me as crazy because we had so little technology in the state. Now, South Carolina has transformed itself and crazy ideas are welcome here. I am proud to have been a part of my state's growth. Because of my state’s visionary leaders and entrepreneurial culture I was able to leap from growing up in poverty to success.”
His full list of patents related to 3D printing are: 4,665,492, 5,134,569, 5,216,616, 5,546,313 and 5,694,324.
A new Patentsnap report reveals the leading jurisdictions and companies for electric vehicle related patent applications
Then there's the old question about drug patents, especially patents on drugs which can save lives rather than just enhance something. Patent extremists like Watchtroll have just unleashed this rant titled "The Myth of ‘Trivial’ Drug Patents" (never mind if taxpayers' money funds much of the discovery) and 5 days ago in Watchtroll ("IPWatchdog") the authors were bashing patent quality, engaging in pure marketing by (and for) Watchtroll himself (again a couple of days later) and spreading this pseudoscience, as usual (Watchtroll is very technology- and science-hostile a site). It is almost as though these people don't care about science and only about lawyering fees. Well, because they do... the latter... for a living. This is what we call pseudoscience:
In this article, I compute a “three-year grant rate” that shows the probability of obtaining a granted patent within three years of the first office action.