Inventive Eats: Incredible Food Innovations Now on Display at the USPTO

The US Patent and Trademark Office ("USPTO") opened a new exhibit yesterday at the Inventor's Hall of Fame, at the Madison Building in Alexandria, Virginia.  The exhibit is the first major exhibit installation to come to the Hall of Fame since it was relocated to Alexandria from Akron, Ohio in 2009.

The exhibit shows how our breakfast cereals, sandwiches, dinner entrees, and more have been transformed by significant events, discoveries and inventions.  It features the important role many of the National Inventors Hall of Fame inductees have played in the array of appetizing innovations that have made the food we eat safer, healthier and more economical.

The exhibit includes:

A full-size Mr. Peanut® character costume from the 1960s, used for Planters marketing, and additional Mr. Peanut artifacts

• A 1950s fully stocked walk-in kitchen
• 19th century patent models, including models of a refrigerator, an egg beater, a flour sifter, and the original Mason jar
• Displays of other well-known trademark food characters, such as the Pillsbury Doughboy® and the Green Giant®
• A Tappan vintage microwave from 1955, the first for home use
• A 19th century patented beehive

If you are near Washingon, DC or Northern Virginia consider stopping by the Inventors Hall of Fame!

Social Networking Patents Emerge from US Patent and Trademark Office (“USPTO”)

Amazon, Google and Facebook have each recently been granted US Patents for social networking related patents.  Each of the patents have issued in the wake of the important case of In re Bilske, 545 F.3d 943 (Fed. Cir. Oct. 30, 2008), cert. Granted sub nom. Bilski v. Doll, 129 S. Ct. 2735 (June 1, 2009) (No. 08-964), renamed Bilski v. Kappos, No. 08-964.  A decision on the Bilske case is expected sometime this spring. 

The issue in the Bilske case involves what test or set of criteria governs the determination of whether a claim to a process is patentable under 35 USC § 101.  Specifically, the questions now before the US Supreme Court are:

1.      1.   [w]hether the Federal Circuit erred by holding that a ‘process’ must be tied to a particular machine or apparatus, or transform a particular article into a different state or thing (‘machine-or-transformation’ test), to be eligible for patenting under 35 U.S.C. § 101, despite this Court's precedent declining to limit the broad statutory grant of patent eligibility for ‘any new and useful process beyond excluding patents for ‘laws of nature, physical phenomena, and abstract ideas’,” and

2.       2. “[w]hether the Federal Circuit's ‘machine-or-transformation’ test for patent eligibility…contradicts the clear Congressional intent that patents protect ‘method[s] of doing or conducting business.’ 35 U.S.C. § 273.” See Bilski v. Kappos, No. 08-964 (June 1, 2009) at  http://origin.www.supremecourtus.gov/qp/08-00964qp.pdf.

US Patent 7,606,725 (“the Amazon patent”) issued October 20, 2009 for a networked computer system that provides various services for assisting users in locating, and sharing information with other users.  The system provides a user interface through which users can establish contact relationships with other users. The system also provides functionality for users to identify contacts of their respective contacts. For example, in one embodiment, each respective user can conduct a search of contacts of the respective user. The search may be limited in scope to users that satisfy one or more particular search criteria, such as users that reside in a particular region or are affiliated with a particular group.

US Patent 7,668,832 (“the Google patent”) issued February 23, 2010 for a computer-implemented method of determining and using geolocation information to target advertisements, determine scoring and pricing information about the advertisements.

US Patent 7,669,123 (“the Facebook patent”) issued February 23, 2010 for generating news items regarding activities associated with a user of a social network environment and attaching an informational link associated with at least one of the activities, to at least one of the news items, as well as limiting access to the news items to a predetermined set of viewers and assigning an order to the news items. The method further may further include displaying the news items in the assigned order to at least one viewing user of the predetermined set of viewers and dynamically limiting the number of news items displayed.

The US Supreme Court decision could render the validity in doubt of many business method patents, including the Amazon, Google and Facebook patents.  

The US Patent and Trademark Office issued Interim PatentSubject Matter Eligibility Examination Instructions on August 24, 2009 after the CAFC Bilske decision.  In the examples provided, example claim 5 is determined to be eligible subject matter because comparing is performed using a microprocessor, whereas example claim 6 is not eligible subject matter even though it provides method steps that include sorting, ranking and comparing, but does not explicitly state using a microprocessor.  Based on this criteria, the Facebook patent may be at risk because the only reference to a computer is in the second paragraph, “storing the plurality of activities in a computer…”  The Amazon and Google patents by comparison, do satisfy the criteria by performing transformational processes by a computer.

Business method patents will be front and center soon after the US Supreme Court issues its ruling and there will be plenty at stake.

USPTO Rescinds Controversial Patent Regulations Package

Yesterday the US Patent and Trademark Office rescinded the controversial Patent Regulations Package, which limited the number of continuation applications as well as the number of claims that could be included within each application.  The regulations were published in the Federal Register in August 2007, but were enjoined and never came into effect.  The full text of the USPTO Press Release is found here.

US Patent Office Proposes Changes to Examiner Count System

US patent examiners operate under a "count system" in which they earn points for performing tasks during the examination of a patent application.  The count system has not been revised since 1976.  The revisions are designed to improve the examiner's working condition, give examiners more examination time and ultimately allow examiners to process applications more quickly.

As the USPTO revises its system, we will also revise our prosecution strategies to compliment the revisions in an effort to benefit our clients.

The full News Release is  available here. http://uspto.gov/web/offices/com/speeches/09-19.htm

A patent examiner has provided his perspective on the proposed changes here: http://just-n-examiner.livejournal.com/37762.html