IBM, for example, the majority of its intellectual-property revenue comes from the sale of know-how, not patent licences alone.
Dr Zoll did not patent his inventions, so there was no impediment to further development of the pacemaker by other scientists.
However the important thing is he did not patent his vaccine either, and both their discoveries were donated for the benefit of mankind.
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The big loser in the process is the independent inventor or small company, who do not seek patent protection for their new ideas because they do not believe (perhaps correctly) that they will ever be able to enforce their patent, so why seek it.
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Indeed, the Prozac patent that was overturned in court was not the patent on the compound, which expires in 2001, but a patent on the use of the compound to treat depression.
The price disparity between the two drugs will only increase in 2006, when Pravachol loses patent protection. (Lipitor does not lose patent protection until 2010.) At that point, cheap generic Pravachol copycats are likely to flood the market.
We should legislate that developing, distributing, or running a program on generally used computing hardware does not constitute patent infringement.
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India for years did not offer patent protection for chemical compounds but was obliged to do so after joining the World Trade Organization in 1995.
The problem is not our patent system.
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While the latest ITC ruling noted that Apple's iPhone 3G model and several Blackberry devices had infringed the patent, the judge indicated this was not grounds for the devices to be banned from sale in the US, on the grounds that the innovation did not deserve its patent status.
Providing information that puts a patent in doubt does not automatically invalidate the patent that is up to the courts.
Samsung responded by showing videos it had made that displayed some phones apparently not violating the patent.
The other side of this is that it is not the only patent that Microsoft alleges Android breaches.
It does not justify a patent regime which hampers biotechnology itself.
However, the jury found that Samsung had not violated the patent that was the basis for the ban on the sale of the Galaxy Tab 10.1.
And they found that the firms that had not outsourced their patent filing activities were much better at identifying potential technology competitors (and their weaknesses) early on.
Though sugar-free gum ended up being adopted quickly by larger players because its inventors did not get secure patent position, Pettman adds that Revolymer has worldwide patents for Rev7.
Ravicher, an engineer and lecturer in law at Cardozo, said the court should simply declare that the natural sequence of proteins that make up a gene is not eligible for patent.
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The orphan drug act only gives them eight years of exclusivity, but it does set a precedent for giving companies an extension of their monopoly that is not based on patent protection.
On Friday, an administrative law judge at the International Trade Commission ruled that Microsoft did not violate a patent owned by Google subsidiary Motorola Mobility when it made the Xbox.
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So if an inventor shows her invention working at a trade show, demonstrates it for an angel investor group or offers a single unit for sale, it will not receive a patent even if she applies the next day.
But a free and open legal system like ours is bound to be subject to a certain number of abusive holdup suits, and not just by patent trolls, but also by product liability trolls, medical malpractice trolls, and shareholder fraud trolls as well.
In addition to the one over licensing fees and a case in Germany involving standard essential patents, Google has maintained legal action against Microsoft in the ITC over a patent relating to a wireless peer-to-peer network, which is not a standard essential patent.
Microsoft contends that a judge used the wrong standard and says the patent office did not consider that i4i had used its HTML editor in software before receiving a patent.
Competitors who did not want to license the patent could create a hardware workaround, and the case hung on whether or not the cost of that workaround could be effectively evaluated.
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The case essentially means that U.S. patent law does not apply overseas and that firms selling products patented in the U.S. must obtain a patent in each country where the patented item is sold.
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