Patent Law Practice Center

Patenting Self-Destructing E-mail Messages

AT&T is seeking another patent on self-destructing e-mail messages. AT&T originally filed a patent application in January 2002 on this technology, which ripened into U.S. Patent No. 7,356,564. The latest patent application to publish in this family tree published on June 20, 2013 as U.S. Patent Application No. 20130159436. We profiled this back in August on IPWatchdog.com. See AT&T Seeks Patents on E-mail Self Destruct and 3D Media Content. Shortly thereafter, the United States Patent and Trademark Office issued a Non-Final Rejection of the application.

This application relates to e-mail, which virtually everyone reading will know is a messaging system used across the world to communicate information to other people. Indeed, so ubiquitous has e-mail become that it is hard to remember when electronic communications via e-mail did not exist. E-mail is so incredibly useful because it’s efficient and practically instantaneous. However, a sender has almost no way to protect confidential information once it has been sent across the Internet, and we have probably all sent one or more messages without thinking things through before clicking “send.” Many have also no doubt sent an e-mail by accident to someone who was not the intended recipient, which can range from a nuisance to embarrassing to completely catastrophic depending on the content.

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Verizon Attacks On Two TiVo Time-Shifting Patents Among The Reexamination Requests Filed The Week of 7/18/11

Here is the latest installment of Reexamination Requests from Scott Daniels, of Reexamination Alert and Practice Center Contributor…

In 2009, TiVo sued Verizon and AT&T for infringement of U.S. Patent Nos. 7,493,015 and 7,529,465 related to time-shifting and play-back of media streams.  Verizon has now requested reexamination of the ‘015 and ‘465 patents (see inter partes Request Nos. (7) & (8)).

Precision Biosciences filed for reexamination of Cellectis’ Patent No. 7,842,489 for single-chain endonucleases useful in genetic modifications of various sorts (see ex parte Request No. (7)).  The two companies are engaged in several infringement and declaratory judgment actions in North Carolina and Delaware involving the ‘489 patent and certain related patents.

RIM requested reexamination of Mobile Media Ideas’ Patent No. 5,732,390 (see ex parte Request No. (9)).  Moble Media has sued RIMfor infringement of the ‘390 patent in the Eastern District of Texas.

Medical device patents are the subject of two requests, one for Voda’sU.S. Patent No. 6,475,195 for an angioplasty catheter guide (see inter partes Request No. (5)) and one for Boston Scientific’s U.S. Patent No. 5,922,021 for an intravascular stent (see ex parte Request No. (1)).

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