Edward H. Phillips v. AWH Corp. et al.: Did the Federal Circuit Change Anything?
September 01, 2005
The Federal Circuit piqued the interest of the patent bar when it issued its decision granting Edward H. Phillips' petition for rehearing <i>en banc</i>. <i>Edward H. Phillips v. AWH Corp. et al.</i>, 376 F.3d 1382 (Fed. Cir. 2004) ("<i>Phillips I</i>"). Patent practitioners expected that the court would finally provide the bar with a clear understanding of how claims should be interpreted and construed. The court's guidance would help not only patent prosecutors so that claims could be crafted with appropriate scope to provide maximum coverage for a client's invention, but also aid patent litigators so that efforts could be focused on specific disputed claim terms and their construction rather than scatter shot attacks on every possible claim term in the hope that one of the shots would hit home. Whether the Federal Circuit provided any guidance to the bar has yet to be determined. However, it is clear that despite the fervent hope of the patent bar, no new law was made with the <i>Phillips en banc</i> decision.
Breaking the Logjam of the Patent Application Backlog
September 01, 2005
You have a brilliant idea and decide to engage a patent attorney to draft a patent application on it. In a matter of months, you will have an issued patent that you can take to the bank, license to others, or use to stop rival companies from competing with you. Right? Not so fast, says the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
Venture Capital-Free Accelerated Monetization of Non-Core IP: A Case Study of an Innovation Company
September 01, 2005
Monetizing non-core IP is rational, practical, and increasingly common. The IP literature is now rich with examples of accelerated monetization of cash-generating IP through the transfer of assets and risks, usually assisted through some form of structured finance. The literature is even richer with countless examples of painstakingly slow monetizations of non-cash-generating IP usually through joint ventures or venture capital-backed transactions. We describe a case in which non-core IP was monetized rapidly after which the bulk of the reward potential remained in the hands of the original IP owners. We suggest that when non-core IP is generated consequent to market demand in the course of the Parent's operations, and merely happens to reside outside the Parent's core business, a rapidly structured Parent-financed spin off can create accelerated financial and strategic benefits.
Keeping Up With Keeping Up
September 01, 2005
Compliance -- dotting all the i's and crossing all the t's in a regulated business -- has always been difficult. The slightest error can lead to fines, a business shutdown or even jail time for executives.
Losing Grasp Of Technology
September 01, 2005
Let me say one word: Internet. Now, how about a couple more: Broadband Access. It's my contention that the security problems we face today in the forms of unsolicited e-mail, virus infection, phishing scams and the dreaded identity-theft issues are the direct result of giving access to powerful computers attached to the Internet via broadband access to users who are unqualified to own, use and operate such technology.
Mastering And Managing Documents
September 01, 2005
The attorney's own realm is no different from any other revenue-generating quarter -- e-commerce or good old-fashioned bricks and cement -- in one truism of the Technology Age: Document management is the most daunting challenge for today's law office. Regardless of the size of the law firm, mountains of file folders and forests of paper are piling up daily in every law office as quickly, and as momentously, as in the offices of their clients. Traditionally, the answer to this challenge has been to hire more clerical staff, more paralegals, and more attorneys and then to scramble to assess and assign outsourcing contracts to help erode some of the paper mountains popping up all around the legal-office landscape.
Solo Aims To Blog His Way To New Clients
September 01, 2005
The small town of Storrs, CT, may soon become the center of the law-blog universe. Andrew W. Ewalt, a solo practicing in the shadows of the University of Connecticut, is a guinea pig for the wildly growing technology, which to date has largely been passed over by the legal profession as a marketing tool.
Not All Property Rights Are Created Equal
September 01, 2005
You've been there and know the terrain: The law breaks property into two categories -- real and personal. If the object of a transaction is found to be personal property, then it is subsequently categorized as either tangible or intangible. In the realm of interconnected networked computers, however, although broadly categorized as personal property, Internet property has characteristics of tangible and intangible property. Consequently, attorneys must take the special nature of Internet property into consideration when attempting to resolve or avoid legal difficulties relating to an Internet transaction, something, of course, to which e-commerce ventures find themselves at ongoing risk and dealing in round-the-clock daily.
Filtering Through Regulatory Compliance
September 01, 2005
The advantages of doing business in a digital economy -- paperless transactions, instant communication, effortless administration and reaching out across borders to far-away locations to collaborate with partners in a virtual community -- are precisely the risks of doing business in a digital economy.
Keeping Tabs On Internet Identity
September 01, 2005
No technology issue concerns -- or should concern -- individuals, e-commerce and government regulators more than Internet identity theft. The statistics are staggering. In the last year, LexisNexis reported that unauthorized people apparently took personal information on more than 30,000 Americans from its database -- by stealing logins and passwords of legitimate customers. Another data broker, ChoicePoint Inc., reported a possible theft of similar data from as many as 145,000 people through individuals claiming to have legitimate and legal use for the data they purchased from ChoicePoint. But those numbers look small (except, of course, to the affected individuals) when compared with the identity-theft problem acknowledged by Bank of America -- involving about 1.2 million federal employees.
