My good friend, Barista Stephen (he loves it when you call him that) from Patent Baristas, recently tagged me with the dreaded Five Things You Didn’t Known About Me” thread.

Here goes:

1. I’m a certified hockey nut. I play. I coach. I scream at the tv. (Go Red Wings!) I even sent my five year old son out onto the ice at a recent Toledo Storm minor league game as the team’s honorary captain. The best measure of my hockey nuttiness, though, is that I recently convinced Doug, a certified non-sports guy, to watch Slapshot on a transatlantic flight. I’m not sure he understood all of it.

2. I have a serious ice cream problem. Seriously. Sometimes I swear I can smell it. But, hey, at least I can admit I’ve got a problem, right?

3. My first car was a candy apple red ‘Vette. Yep, in high school, I was the proud owner of a bad-ass Chevy CHEvette. Hey…at least it was cooler than my sister’s lime green hatch-back Mustang. I mean, seriously…a hatch-back mustang? Come on! What we’re they thinking.

4. That same sister lost the baseball glove my dad gave me when I was a kid. Nothing special about the glove, other than the fact that it was the glove he used in tryouts with the Detroit Tigers. He doesn’t know it’s gone yet. My sister’s really hoping he doesn’t read this blog. I am, too, actually – this has made great leverage over the years.

5. I once accepted a bunch of bananas as payment. Well…sort of. I spent time working as a microbiologist on a medical team in the Dominican Republic many years ago. One morning, an elderly woman visited our clinic and asked us to help her husband. He couldn’t get out of bed, so one of the docs made a “house call” that night. I went along. When we arrived at her dirt-floored hut, my doctor friend quickly determined that the elderly man was dying. He gave the woman some sugar pills for her husband. His rationale – “he’s in the process of dying…those pills will put his mind at ease…and hers…and allow him to pass peacefully.” She was very grateful. As we left, she took an enormous bunch of bananas from a hanger on the wall of the hut, and insisted we take the entire thing as payment. We did.

That’s it. If you knew any of those things about me, let me know. I’ll give you another.

I pass the “Five Things” torch onto Kyle McFarland, Peter Zura, my nieces, Lindsey and Kaylee Levans (yes, guys, you can do it together), uber law blogger Dennis Kennedy, and PHOSITA Laura.

The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit recently considered whether arguments made during prosecution of a parent application operated as a disclaimer against a relatively broad claim scope in a subsequently filed continuation application. Judge Newman authored the Court’s opinion that, in essence, trimmed claim scope from the continuation claims based on the parent.

While the ability to file the continuation application was not squarely at issue, Judge Newman addressed it with a single sentence that includes some very interesting language:

“Hakim had the right to refile the application and attempt to broaden the claims.” (emphasis added)

Characterizing the ability to refile an application to seek broadened claim scope as a right is certainly interesting, considering that the legal status of the Patent Office’s proposed rules that would limit the ability to do so remains in limbo and the subject of rumors.

Read the FedCirc.us analysis of the Federal Circuit’s opinion in Hakim v. Cannon Avent Group for more detail on the case and opinion.<br /.

One of the “poster boys” of the software/high-tech side of the patent reform debate is setting up camp in D.C. Micron has apparently opened a “governmental affairs” office in the area and, according to Business Week, has charged it with the task of leading the company’s lobbying efforts on patent reform, among other issues.

The timing of this development is rather interesting. Rumor has it, Jon Dudas recently characterized the PTO’s proposed rules that would limit continuation filings as “dead as a door nail.” Perhaps this reform failure has Mircon realizing the extent of the distance between Idaho and D.C.