Speaking to a group of high tech leaders in the White House's East Wing, the president pledged to enact crucial intellectual property and patent policies within 12 months.
For anyone with an invention to sell, patent and intellectual property protection is their first priority.
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Intellectual Ventures, the patent licensing and research firm founded by former Microsoft exec Nathan Myhrvold, will remain an investor in the company.
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And the first rumblings of a rights-management system for controlling the sharing of physical things are appearing: The IP-hoarding firm Intellectual Ventures received a patent in October for a 3-D printer feature that blocks the creation of verboten objects.
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But there is a caveat emptor of sorts when it comes to filing patent according to intellectual property attorney Nicholas Wells of the law firm Wells IP Law.
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Those arrangements are part of an agency program intended to forestall disputes with companies, including disagreements over the price paid by offshore units for patent and other intellectual property rights.
Intellectual Ventures just had a patent issued on automatic, battery-powered glasses, with a tiny video camera that reads the image off the retina and adjusts the fluid-filled lenses accordingly, up to ten times a second.
In the past politicians mostly left patent policy to specialists, since it seemed arcane and technical, but as intellectual property has grown in importance the flaws in Europe's patent system have become more glaring.
ThinkFire managers did not confront him after learning that Intellectual Ventures was bidding at the same patent auction.
Novartis had filed a plea with the Supreme Court after the Intellectual Property Appellate Board had rejected a patent claim for Glivec.
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But former colleagues of Myhrvold and patent experts watching moves at Intellectual Ventures say the firm is less an invention company than a protection company.
The German company last year approached the Intellectual Property Appellate Board after the local patent authority granted a "compulsory license" to Natco Pharma Ltd.
We found a defender of the patent system in the leading intellectual property lawyer Guy Burkill QC, who has acted for some of the giants of the mobile phone industry.
Of course, this is also a bit of a deal with the devil -- Intellectual Ventures might be the most infamous patent troll in history, and HTC and Samsung have essentially decided the risks and cost of doing business with IV are more favorable than the risks and cost of going to court.
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Pat Choate, who is the author of Hot Property, a book on the theft of intellectual property, argues that if the new patent regimen had existed when corporations like Apple and Microsoft first got going, they might never have made it out of the little leagues.
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But other off-patent drugs are doing less well without intellectual property law's protection.
By contrast, China has developed a National Intellectual Property Strategy, aggressively targeting 2 million Chinese patent applications annually by 2015, spurring initiative and innovation with cash rewards, houses and tax breaks.
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"There are those of us who genuinely love these things and see something in them that a lot of people don't see, but it doesn't really convert to a commercial reality, " says Donald Kelly, the former executive director of the Rothschild Petersen Patent Model Museum, who now runs Intellectual Asset Management Associates, a Washington, D.
Intellectual property wonks are constantly griping about the quality of patent reviews performed by examiners working for the U.S. government.
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The company ranked second in patent applications last year, according to the World Intellectual Property Organization.
Also, on Dec. 20 Biolase acquired the intellectual property of Diodem , which stopped the latter's patent infringement action against Biolase.
Strategically focused patent portfolio development is a key process in protecting intellectual property and one that may enable a smaller player to have relatively large leverage in an industry, because it can obtain an asset of value to a competitor.
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Heeding Gibbs' advice, James Rogan, who was appointed last year as director of the patent office (and is a former congressman who served on intellectual-property subcommittees), tried to push full funding through Congress.
The Intellectual Property Bill aims to make it easier for businesses to protect their intellectual property, particularly their designs, with the introduction of a Unified Patent Court that most EU countries have signed up to.
IBM, for example, the majority of its intellectual-property revenue comes from the sale of know-how, not patent licences alone.
One's perspective shifts easily, however, when targets change and the defendants themselves are no longer aggressively litigious corporations with an arsenal of filing cabinets spilling over with intellectual property, as was the case when one company used a recently granted patent to go after a number of podcasting networks.
Thomas Cotter, an intellectual property professor at the University of Florida law school, doesn't think the patent will hold.
The Graedons noted that while the active ingredient of the drug goes off patent, the pharmaceutical chemistry behind the extended delivery system may still be the intellectual property of the brand-name manufacturer.
And intellectual property consulting firm TechIPM analyzed LTE-related patents registered to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office by the second quarter of this year and reported that LG held the largest overall number of patents as well.
Second, tax specialists complain that Mr Osborne is not being bold enough: they say, for example, that the so-called "patent box", the device for lowering the tax on profits earned from UK intellectual property, will benefit only a limited number of firms.
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