American Patent Law

Students and established scholars of intellectual property law often look for historical context when trying to understand the development and present-day contours of IP rules and systems. American Patent Law supplies this context, offering readers a comprehensive account of the evolution of the US patent system and patent doctrine beginning in 1790. From the technologies for harvesting wood and shoemaking in the earliest periods to computer software and biotechnology of the present, each chapter of the book covers the characteristic technologies of each historical era. The book also describes how businesspeople in each era acquired and enforced patents and used patents as the foundation of various business arrangements. This book is a landmark in the history of technologies, the US patent system, and the way private actors have deployed patents across American history.

A new perspective on United States software development, seen through the patent battles that shaped our technological landscape This first comprehensive history of software patenting explores how patent law made software development the powerful industry that it is today. Historian Gerardo Con Díaz reveals how patent law has transformed the ways computing firms make, own, and profit from software. He shows that securing patent protection for computer programs has been a central concern among computer developers since the 1950s and traces how patents and copyrights became inseparable from software development in the Internet age. Software patents, he argues, facilitated the emergence of software as a product and a technology, enabled firms to challenge each other's place in the computing industry, and expanded the range of creations for which American intellectual property law provides protection. Powerful market forces, aggressive litigation strategies, and new cultures of computing usage and development transformed software into one of the most controversial technologies ever to encounter the American patent system.

Far more than a revised update, this new edition of a well-received guide to US patent law is twice as valuable to European patent practitioners as the previous edition. It is virtually a brand new book. The author, drawing on her recent years at a US firm, has augmented each chapter with practical information – including lines of argumentation to overcome obviousness rejections – and added new chapters, as well as much more detail on petitions and appeals, post-grant proceedings, and litigation. The new edition tells European practitioners not just about the framework of US patent law, but how it is applied. No other such book exists. With an overview of options at each stage of US patent prosecution and enforcement – with particular emphasis on its differences from the EPO system – the new edition details the available courses of action for all the procedural scenarios a European patent attorney is likely to encounter. The coverage is loaded with practical guidance on such aspects of US patent law and procedure as the following: · drafting applications and filing them at the US Patent Office; · applying provisions of the America Invents Act of 2011; · possible responses to a Final Office Action; · costs, fees, and time periods for various procedural actions; · using the US Manual of Patent Examination Procedure (MPEP); · declarations, oaths, and affidavits; · the Quick Path Information Disclosure Statement (QPIDS); · submissions on patentability by third parties; and · supplemental replies during examination proceedings. Every step in the process is described and directly compared as it operates under both the European Patent Convention (EPC) and US patent law. Any practitioner who has unsuccessfully tried to pursue in the US claims that were granted in the EPO will gain a new understanding of the reasons why – and what to do about it. In this highly practical, one-of-a-kind book, European patent professionals will find, detail by detail, exactly what is required at every stage of patent proceedings in the US. There is no other available source of such instantly accessible information for European patent lawyers, in-house counsel and paralegals, or EPC or national patent office officials, to all of whom this book will be of immeasurable value and usefulness. Intellectual property law academics and students will also benefit from the book’s comparative approach.

Christopher Beauchamp debunks the myth of Alexander Graham Bell as the telephone’s sole inventor, exposing that story’s origins in the arguments advanced by Bell’s lawyers during fiercely contested battles for patent monopoly. The courts anointed Bell father of the telephone—likely the most consequential intellectual property right ever granted.

This significantly updated second edition of the Research Handbook on Patent Law provides comprehensive coverage of new research for patent protection in three major jurisdictions: the United States, Europe and Japan.