USPTO Expands Patent Law School Clinic Certification Pilot Program.  The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) today announced that it will open the current Patent Law School Clinic Certification Pilot Program to admit 10 additional schools for the upcoming fall 2012 academic year. This pilot program allows law students to practice patent law before the agency under the guidance of a law school faculty clinic supervisor.  Submissions from interested law schools will be accepted through Friday, June 1, 2012.

Participating Law Schools

University of Akron School of Law	American University, Washington College of Law
University of Connecticut School of Law	The George Washington University School of Law
Howard University School of Law	The John Marshall School of Law
University of Maine School of Law	University of Maryland School of Law
University of New Hampshire School of Law	North Carolina Central University School of Law
University of Puerto Rico School of Law	University of Richmond – Richmond School of Law
Rutgers Law School – Newark	Vanderbilt College of Law
West Virginia University School of Law	William Mitchell College of Law

 

Supreme Court Unanimously Holds Prometheus Method Claim Unpatentable Subject Matter by Merely Reciting Law of Nature

In a unanimous decision, (BREYER, J., delivered the opinion for a unanimous Court) the Supreme Court on March 20, 2012, reversed the Federal Circuit and held that method claim for treating autoimmune diseases are not eligible for patent protection because it merely recites a law of nature.  Mayo Collaborative Services v. Prometheus Laboraties, Inc., U.S., No. 10-1150, 3/20/2012.  If a law of nature is not patentable, then neither is a process reciting a law of nature, unless that process has additional features that provide practical assurance that the process is more than a drafting effort designed to monopolize the law of nature itself. A patent, for example, could not simply recite a law of nature and then add the instruction “apply the law.”
Cite as: 566 U. S. ____ (2012)
Opinion of the Court

Yahoo enforces its patents against Facebook. According to the lawsuit, filed in Federal District Court in San Jose, Calif., Yahoo contended that Facebook had knowingly and improperly violated some of the company’s core intellectual properties. The patents, which were issued from 1999 to 2010, cover advertising, privacy, customization, social networking and messaging reported by the NYTimes

See a perspective from an unsuspecting inventor for Yahoo Patents  in an article titled, “A Patent Lie: How Yahoo Weaponized My Work.”

 

http://www.oyez.org/cases/2010-2019/2011/2011_10_1219#bluebook

http://www.c-spanvideo.org/randallrader  Judge Randall Rader and the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals