I had reason to read several obviousness-related cases over the weekend. While I wasn’t surprised when my review led me back to Graham v. John Deere, I was a bit surprised when I read this paragraph from the opinion where the Court discussed, of all things, the inconsistent patentability standards being applied during examination….and the application backlog at the Patent and Trademark Office.

Inauguration week didn’t disappoint – plenty of interesting patent finds: infringement filings plunge in 2008, more quality over quantity (and, perhaps, some quantity over quality), patent lessons from the Depression, the difference between patent lawyers and programmers, and President Obama pressures PTO to increase transparency in a two line text file.

Inauguration week didn’t disappoint – plenty of interesting patent finds: infringement filings plunge in 2008, more quality over quantity (and, perhaps, some quantity over quality), patent lessons from the Depression, the difference between patent lawyers and programmers, and President Obama pressures PTO to increase transparency in a two line text file.

Remember that Dennis Crouch initially focused attention on the Patent and Trademark Office’s use of a ‘robots.txt’ file to restrict search engines from crawling and indexing decisions of the Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences. Now we have an interesting twist: President Obama, acting swiftly on his stated commitment to transparency in government, adopted a wide-open robots.txt file on the whitehouse.gov servers on his first day in office. The file replaced the 2400-line restrictive robots.txt file that was on the servers, thanks to the Bush administration, up to the day before. The PTO cleary can’t keep its restrictive approach under the new administration. And, thanks to President Obama’s swift action, we now see that, indeed, it is something that can be changed overnight.

Following the Supreme Court’s rollback of the teaching-suggestion-motivation litmus test for obviousness, many believed secondary considerations of nonobviousness would receive more attention in the Graham obviousness analysis. After living with KSR v. Teleflex for nearly two years, we’re beginning to see opinions from the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit that discuss secondary considerations in light of KSR. The opinions are beginning to reveal an unexpected twist, though – the role of secondary considerations in the obviousness analysis might be beginning to wither.

I started the Promote the Progress site five years ago today with this innocuous post about, ironically enough, the EPO and its workload problems. Happy Anniversary to PTP!

As the Obama administration prepares to take over, it seems a bit odd that we haven’t seen any official indication that Jon Dudas has submitted his resignation. This has me wondering if we’ll see an official report of Dudas leaving office. Is it possible the transition happen unceremoniously? Or, is it possible that the Obama administration never requested a resignation letter from Dudas?

This week brought a lot of great patent-related reading material: a developing trend in focusing on patent quality over quantity, BigPharma’s patent cliff begins to reveal itself, and a reminder of an easy way to reduce patent litigation expenses and improve the business outcomes in the process.

A few weeks ago, Dennis Crouch shone light of the fact that the USPTO web server housing decisions of the Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences blocks search engine bots from crawling and indexing the decisions. Dennis linked directly to the server’s robots.txt file, which, as of today, still blocks access to all bots. I had the chance to exchange emails with Hal Wegner about this problem and a proposed solution over the weekend, and figured I’d summarize our discussion on the blog in hopes of eliciting further input on a proposed solution.

Since eBay was announced, some have wondered about the breadth of this newfound discretion of the district courts. Last month, in its last patent-related opinion of 2008, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit left no doubt that the abuse of discretion standard of review ensures that the eBay-conferred discretion is, indeed, quite broad.