Patent Law Practice Center

USPTO to Host Software Partnership Meeting at Berkeley Law

The U.S. Department of Commerce’s United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) recently announced that it will host its next Software Partnership Meeting on Thursday, October 17, 2013, at the U.C. Berkeley School of Law in Berkeley, California.

The purpose of the meeting, among other things, is to allow senior USPTO officials to provide an overview of the executive actions related to patent assertion entities and U.S. innovation initiatives called for in President Obama’s executive actions on June 4th. See also, Obama on Patent Trolls — Much Ado About Nothing. Other topics open for discussion will include feedback from the previous Software Partnership roundtables held in Silicon Valley and New York; a summary of the written comments received in response to the January Federal Register notice announcing the Software Partnership; proposed next steps by the USPTO; and an interactive discussion session on strategies to improve claim clarity, such as the use of glossaries in patent applications.

If you cannot attend the meeting live, the event will also be viewable live online through the USPTO website. For those who do wish to attend live, the USPTO announcement explains that space will be quite limited and, as a result, RSVPs must be received by September 27, 2013.

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Software Will Remain Patent Eligible

Apple Patents Digital Handshake Between Devices

On April 23, 2013, Apple obtained U.S. Patent No. 8429407, titled Digital Handshake between Devices.

Creating a secure connection between two devices that are in close physical proximity allows users to share a great deal of digital content. Instead of showing a webpage or document to another person by turning the screen towards them, a user could choose to send the info directly to another device, preventing people from having to crowd around a small device screen to see. The same is true of videos and pictures. Also, some applications allow users to interact with other nearby devices for money transfers or to play a game.

Apple was granted the right to protect the system of creating a secured connection between devices laid out in this patent. It would allow an iPhone to create a bar code or alphanumerical code that can be scanned by the camera of another device. Once the “digital handshake” has taken place, other phones can also scan the key that was generated by the device to connect with the other devices as well.

As Claim 1 describes, Apple has gained legal protections over:

“A method for establishing a communications path between a first device and a second device, comprising: capturing an image of the second device using the first device; extracting, from the image, a first key associated with the second device; selecting from a plurality of processes a process to be used for generating a digital handshake key; generating the digital handshake key using the selected process with the first key; and establishing a communications path with the second device using the digital handshake key.” (more…)

Unanimous SCOTUS Sides with Monsanto on Seeds

On Monday, May 13, 2013, the United States Supreme Court, in a unanimous decision, ruled that a farmer who buys Monsanto’s patented seeds cannot then propagate new seeds for future use without infringing the underlying patent.

The opening paragraph in the Court’s decision, which was delivered by Justice Kagan, succinctly captures the essence of the ruling. Justice Kagan wrote:

Federal Circuit Makes Mess of Software Patents

In what can only fairly be characterized as a patent tragedy, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit now has no official position on the patentability of system claims that objectively recite volumes of tangible structures that clearly satisfy the machine-or-transformation test. Less than 5 years after giving the industry the rigid machine-or-transformation test, which was ultimately struck down by the Supreme Court, five of the ten judges that heard CLS Bank v. Alice Corporation en banc would find that claims that seem to clearly satisfy the machine-or-transformation test are not patent eligible.

The per curiam decision of the Federal Circuit was very brief. It simply stated:

Upon consideration en banc, a majority of the court affirms the district court’s holding that the asserted method and computer-readable media claims are not directed to eligible subject matter under 35 U.S.C. § 101. An equally divided court affirms the district court’s holding that the asserted system claims are not directed to eligible subject matter under that statute.

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