Skincare Brands To Consider If You’re Sick of Excessive Packaging

By MC Staff

How to Fix the Patent System

Source: Imagine you’re a small-business owner. You receive a letter from an unknown company threatening legal action concerning the seemingly innocuous scanner you’ve been using in your shop. Specifically, the letter calls out a very obscure and complex piece of patented technology in the device. The letter claims you don’t have the appropriate license to use the technology, but it’s also vague on who owns the patent or whom to contact for more details. What is clear is the proposed settlement amount, which is slightly less than the cost of retaining an attorney to fight the claim. This scenario is a common demand-letter scheme employed by some non-practicing entities (NPEs) and patent assertion entities (PAEs)—companies that attempt to solicit settlements from end users of patented technology. Some of these groups do not even develop new or innovative technology or products. Michael Moore is deputy general counsel of intellectual property for Sunnyvale, California-based Rambus, which holds 2,400 patents and applications worldwide. With more than a decade of work in intellectual property law, Moore is an expert in the wording and quality of patents. <div class="pull-quote"> “Truly high-quality patents help support the value of the work that all researchers, engineers, and scientists contribute.” </div> NPEs legally purchase patents that are unused or no longer relevant from the original owners or on the secondary market. In recent cases that have drawn public ire and political attention, some NPEs have targeted small businesses that don’t have the technical or financial resources to defend against infringement claims. PricewaterhouseCoopers found that two-thirds of all patent infringement lawsuits are filed by PAEs—28 percent higher than five years ago (though changes in joinder rules contained in the America Invents Act in September 2011 likely account for much of this increase). The US General Accounting Office (GAO) reported that software-related infringement accounted for nearly 90 percent of the increase in infringement defendants from 2007 to 2011. Moore points out that most of the NPE activity cited by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the GAO is related to software patents, which may be open to broad interpretation due to the way the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) permits “functional claiming,” which is based on a function performed by a software program rather than its structure. This is the type of patent favored by PAEs, such as those related to online shopping carts, inventory management, and other concepts that have corresponding equivalents in traditional, offline business. “These software patents tend to use broad, generic language to describe something that is already very well-known,” Moore says. “Clicking a button to put online items in your shopping cart shouldn’t be patentable.” By contrast, he says that “high-quality” patents should provide detailed specifications, figures, and comprehensive explanations of the innovation, how it is implemented, and how it improves performance of the underlying product, system, or hardware. They should also include detailed citations to relevant prior art for USPTO examiners to consider in examination. <h4>Remedy Through Reform</h4> In 2014, Congress stepped in to attempt to curtail some questionable patent assertion practices. Most notably, it passed the Innovation Act, H.R. 3309, authored by Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA). The Senate also considered bills from senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) (the Patent Transparency and Improvements Act, S. 1720) and senators John Cornyn (R-TX) (S. 1013) and Orrin Hatch (R-UT) (S. 1612), among others. While these pieces of legislation have been well-intentioned and contain some appropriate remedies, critics argue that they take an overly broad approach that negatively affects legitimate patent holders, especially small companies. Senator Leahy withdrew his Patent Transparency and Improvements Act, citing “severe unintended consequences on legitimate patent holders who employ thousands of Americans” as one of his reasons. <div class="callout callout-wide"> <h3 class="p1">On the Trail: Bad-Faith Demand Letters</h3> <ol> <li class="p1">Patent holder sells an unwanted patent (no longer relevant to his/her business) to a non-practicing entity (NPE).</li> <li class="p1">The NPE often assigns the patent asset to a shell company, or assertion entity, within a complex corporate structure, making it difficult to determine who controls the asset and who benefits financially from it.</li> <li class="p1">The assertion entity sends infringement claims via vague demand letters to small-scale end users of products allegedly using the patented technology. Examples of such assertion letters include those relating to scanners and Wi-Fi products used by thousands of individuals and small businesses.</li> <li class="p1">Usually, the demand amounts are slightly less than the cost of defending infringement allegations, and the letters often threaten to sue shortly if payment is not sent. Recipients of such letters are often consumer-level users (without technical expertise or financial resources to mount a defense) who settle the claim out of fear of the threatened suit.</li> </ol> </div> “We believe it is more appropriate to leave fee shifting to the courts most familiar with the facts of each individual case, rather than making it mandatory,” Moore explains. He suggests two additional reforms that would lead to better protection of intellectual property and high-quality patents: One would require clear identification of patent owners, their affiliates, and partners or licensors to provide transparency to defendants in any potential infringement action. The other would prevent claimants from targeting consumers or small-business users while preserving the right to take action against infringing product manufacturers or vendors.One of the most contentious reform issues relates to fee shifting, which may require the losing party in a patent infringement suit to pay the winning party’s costs. (Only 9.2 percent of NPEs that go to court win their cases.) However, opponents fear that smaller, legitimate intellectual-property owners and patent holders unable to afford such expenses may choose not to pursue justifiable, good-faith infringement claims. As a result, fee shifting could potentially dampen the pace of innovation if small research-and-development companies and inventors decide not to invest in new research due to the cost of protecting their ideas. <h4>Best Practices to Protect Patent Quality</h4> Rambus has been proactive in improving patent quality and ensuring its ability to protect the company’s intellectual property. Its senior technical experts have worked directly with USPTO examiners to provide technical training on current state-of-the-art technology. The company has also provided testimony to and hosted a delegation from the International Trade Commission to show how protecting US innovation supports research-and-development jobs and strengthens the US economy. “Truly high-quality patents help support the value of the work that all researchers, engineers, and scientists contribute,” Moore says. “Without this, the patent system and the innovation it is designed to protect are diminished.” He suggests that interested parties can support patent reform using a handful of best practices. Product designers, manufacturers, and research-and-development companies should engage with leading IP organizations to lobby for measured and effective patent reform. Patent reform should target specific, undesirable behaviors while maintaining the economic value of existing high-quality US patents. When discussing patent reform, Moore advises highlighting the value that research and development and related innovation provide to the US economy, such as 40 million IP-related jobs, more than $5 trillion of annual economic activity, the three-quarters of all US exports for which IP-related products and services account, and 35 percent of US GDP. He says patents should be treated as valuable corporate assets and key investments to protect research activity. “Work closely with internal business partners to develop a patent strategy that complements existing business and future business strategies,” he adds, which may include licensing for monetization, cross-licensing, or patent sales. Finally, he advises accelerating the “innovation engine” by recognizing and rewarding individual inventors and project teams. “The more we can raise awareness concerning the value of intellectual property, the better we can appropriately protect owners’ rights and improve the efficiency of the system that’s in place to encourage innovation.”

Discover, License, Don't Repeat

Source: According to a recent study by IT and business automation company Redwood Software, about 25 percent of most employees’ time worldwide is spent on repetitive tasks. That knowledge, combined with her training as an engineer, has driven Meredith McKenzie to look for ways to reduce repetition at Juniper Networks, a Fortune 1000 global designer and seller of networking equipment. McKenzie earned an electrical engineering degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and landed a job at Intel as a microprocessor design engineer after graduation. At the time, Intel had a program to help its engineers go to law school while working in its legal department. Now deputy general counsel at Juniper Networks, her engineering background lends a unique perspective to solving the bottlenecks and inefficiency that can needlessly slow down progress. One of her responsibilities is to oversee intellectual property and product support, including inbound technology licensing, which covers instances in which Juniper must integrate technology from another company into one of its products. This was the first area in which she saw opportunity for improvement. “It’s easy to create templates and standard processes for some legal documents like nondisclosure agreements (NDAs)”—which, in Juniper’s case, are generally designed to protect its proprietary technology from third parties—“and real estate leases,” she says, “but inbound technology licensing is much more complex and has issues that can change from case to case.” Inbound licensing deals tend to be highly negotiated and are more likely to vary from deal to deal. This is because each deal is specialized to reflect specific technology, including its particular purpose and usage, plus each company supplying technology has a different business model for licensing its technology. It is not uncommon for companies to improve their patent program process, nor is it uncommon to have standard clauses or a list of alternative clauses for various types of licenses. Juniper is no different. But, says McKenzie, the clauses did not provide guidance on their interaction with other clauses. This left negotiators without additional knowledge to negotiate as a whole, rather than one clause at a time. McKenzie’s nine-person team (including seven lawyers) discovered a group of clauses and definitions in most licensing agreements that tend to be repeatedly disputed and often interact in unique ways with other clauses, so they created a template that lists various options for each, essentially ending up with a multiple-choice framework. For instance, a variety of choices are provided for describing the “limitation of liability” clause along with possible interactions with other clauses and how those should be amended accordingly. The attorneys are, thus, able to provide guidance to the users regarding the alternatives and how they may interact with other parts of the document. “This has given the whole process a lot more consistency—no matter which business units are involved—while still giving the internal clients some freedom of choice,” says McKenzie. “It helps people in the company understand why we need certain language in these agreements.” It’s also enabled her to utilize the services of some of her lower-level attorneys. McKenzie calls this new document the “licensing playbook” and intends to create similar templates for other common legal transactions. All of them will be dynamic (they will be tweaked as users and situations demand). Studies show that templates streamline workflows and ensure nothing essential is missed. McKenzie agrees: “These documents will enable us to capture institutional knowledge and reflect things we’ve learned. No one person can remember everything. The playbooks will allow us to add things that we learn, so the next person can benefit from the previous person’s experience and avoid the need to ‘recreate the wheel’ or repeat knowledge-gathering.” McKenzie is further streamlining processes through her redesign of the company’s e-discovery process. The company used to treat every case separately, McKenzie says. There can be a lot of overlap in e-discovery. Rather than gather the same information twice, she’s set up a central repository for all e-discovery-related material, so it is more easily searchable and recoverable. McKenzie has assigned one person, a litigation paralegal, to be the gatekeeper or central point person to help people obtain what they need when they need it. McKenzie’s team is tackling process improvement one IP area at a time. Now that they have made headway in this area, she says, improving litigation is next on the list.

The Christmas countdown is officially on! And how do we know? Because the Marks & Spencer Christmas advert has just hit screen. And the star is a certain Holly Willoughby – and her enviable wardrobe. We can’t stop thinking about the fabulous purple coat that she wears during the ad – which is FINALLY available to purchase now.

Although it was released in store earlier this month, you can now purchase it online for £89. The single-breasted design has already proved a massive hit on Instagram, due to not only the gorgeous wide lapels, the on-trend, oversize fit and super cosy wool texture – but also the fact that Vogue Williams, Holly and fashion blogger Erica Davies have all rocked it. Now if you don’t know who Erica Davies is – let us enlighten you. Erica is a huge fashion influencer and has always been a big fan of M&S, having single-handedly made THAT starry-print constellation dress a sellout last year.

Speaking about how to style the purple coat of dreams, the chic mother-of-two advised: “Do not fear the purple hue. It works SO WELL with navy blue, bright yellow (yes really), orange or red AND emerald green. It’s a completely useful shade if you want to inject some colour into your life. And who doesn’t want that? We couldn’t agree more, E.

Second earth deep abundantly winged appear air can’t earth

She added: “I used to feel like I could only wear a certain type of clothing and I think sometimes you just get stuck in a bit of a rut and wear the same thing over and over again and you create rules for yourself, you think ‘ooh I can’t wear trousers because I’ve got a big bum’ and you create some sort of rule book of your own and sometimes you’ve just got to go ‘right, I’m going to tear up that rule book and I’m going to experiment or I’m going to find my trouser, or I’m going to find my V-neck top or I’m going to find the place that does the perfect T-shirt’. It’s about finding the right things.”

“Anyone can get dressed up and glamorous, but it is how people dress in their days off that are the most intriguing.”

Ali, who gave birth to the couple’s baby daughter Isla in September, looked gorgeous in a black maxi dress that featured an off-the-shoulder neckline. Holly was also her typically stylish self, wearing a white summer dress, while Scarlett looked lovely in a zebra-print number.

MIDDLETON’S BABY’S NAME REVEALED

The gang, who were joined by their other female friends and I’m a Celeb co-host Dec, appeared to be in high spirits as they were pictured chatting and laughing. It’s all go-go-go for the cast as I’m a Celeb returns on Sunday night. This year’s celebrity campmates are expected to be revealed the day before but the various star sightings at Brisbane Airport have already given the game away.

Presenters Holly and Dec have also been drumming up excitement over on their social media accounts.
The This Morning star shared a photo of the pair on Instagram.
Holly and I are looking forward to welcoming you to Australia next Sunday night.

There’s only a week to go before I’m a Celebrity returns to screens, and ahead of the launch, show’s leading ladies have been enjoying some downtime together. Presenter Holly Willoughby, who has stepped in for Ant McPartlin this year, was pictured having a laugh with Scarlett Moffatt, who co-hosts the spin-off show, I’m a Celebrity: Extra Camp. The TV stars were joined by Declan Donnelly’s wife Ali Astall on their day out in New South Wales, Australia. Photographed in a suitably verdant setting alongside her co-presenter, Holly looked ready to take on anything with a retro Cowgirl-esque outfit. Dressed in the supercool Danish brand Ganni, a.k.a the go-to designer for influencers worldwide, Holly wore the ultra cute ‘Salvia’ suede mini skirt in dark camel with frill detailing that buttoned all the way up at the front.