Patent Law Practice Center

Top 5 PLI Patent Law Posts of the Year

Every Friday, the Patent Law Practice Center likes to provide our readers with highlights from the week’s best patent law blog posts and articles. As 2011 reaches its end, and as the new year causes people to look back on the year that was, we thought it was a great opportunity to present to you the Patent Law Practice Center’s top 5 posts of the year:

1) America Invents Act: How the New Law Impacts Your Clients and Your Patent Practice, Parts 1 & 2: Explanations provided by Robert A. Armitage of Eli Lilly and Company, and Janet Gongola, Patent Reform Coordinator at the USPTO, helped in breaking down the AIA for the masses.

2) A New Doctrine of Equivalents? CAFC Defines “Use” Under §271 – Written by Gene Quinn, of IPWatchdog and Practice Center Contributor, this post discusses Centillion Data Systems, LLC v. Qwest Communications International, Inc., and questions whether it will “breathe new life into the doctrine of equivalents” given the Court’s determination of the meaning of “use” of a system as a matter of law under 35 U.S.C. 271 (a). (more…)

The Truth About Hedy Lamarr

Written by Brandon Baum,  of Baum Legal and Practice Center Contributor.

It seems the entire Internet recently discovered the Hedy Lamarr patent story. Hedy Lamarr was a beautiful actress in the 1930′s-40′s, who was once dubbed “The Most Beautiful Woman in the World.” She also is the named co-inventor on a patent for an anti-jamming system for guiding torpedoes.  The system relied on a clever “frequency hopping” scheme, employing a player piano roll to switch frequencies. Frequency hopping is a type of spread spectrum technology that eventually made its way into the modern cell phone. Great story right? Beautiful actress is secretly a brilliant inventor.  (more…)