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By Matt Dias • November 7th, 2012

Election 2012 The biggest news of the week is certainly the election.  And in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, New Jersey announced that it will allow residents to vote by e-mail.  While some feel this is simply a sign of things to come, the decision has been met with harsh criticism from several parties.  NJ [...]

Ronald Mann, Columbia Law professor and contributor to SCOTUSBlog, recently addressed the rising proportion of intellectual property cases on the Supreme Court’s docket. After evaluating the statistics, Mann proposes two possibilities for the long-term trend he identifies toward a more central role for intellectual property disputes on the Court’s docket. The first possibility refers to [...]

Compliance seems to be the hardest word Last month, Apple suffered a defeat in its global IP-war with Samsung over its Galaxy Tab tablet computer:  the UK Court of Appeal upheld the High Court’s ruling that Samsung’s Galaxy Tab did not infringe Apple’s European Community registered design.  The Court of Appeal also affirmed the High [...]

As the notice-and-comment process that has been a feature of agency rulemaking for the past 60 years moves online, citizens have started to exercise their right to spam. Some scholars, notably Stuart Shulman, write that electronic comment tools flood agencies with low-quality comments that agencies ultimately ignore. Shulman, The Case Against Mass E-mails: Perverse Incentives [...]

Samsung and Apple Exchange Patent Victories Between US ITC and The Hague In the ongoing worldwide IP battle royale, Apple has struck another blow against Samsung. The US International Trade Commission yesterday issued a preliminary ruling in favor of Apple, holding that Samsung phones infringed on four of six claimed patents relating to audio, multi-touch [...]

On October 5, 2012, the Supreme Court granted cert. to hear Monsanto Co. v. Bowman. Monsanto is an agriculture company and one of its primary focuses is to develop genetically modified crops that are resistant to glyphosate herbicides such as Roundup® brand herbicide. Herbicide resistant crops allow farmers to spray herbicide over the entire planting [...]

Bounce-Back on “Rubber-Banding” Patent In response to an ex parte re-examination proceeding, the United States Patent and Trademark Office issued a tentative decision invalidating all 20 claims of Apple’s patent for “rubber-banding” in its UI, which was a personal favorite of Steve Jobs. The USPTO found that this patent was invalid because it was anticipated [...]

The Authors Guild, Inc. v. HathiTrust, decided earlier this month, marks the second victory this year for fair use of copyrighted works for scholarly purposes (the first being Cambridge University Press v. Becker).  In an opinion issued by Judge Baer, the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York granted HathiTrust’s motion [...]

Although still the province of tinkerers and hobbyists, 3D printing technology has matured significantly in the last few years and seems poised to hit the mainstream. Commentators have analogized the current state of 3D printing to the era of hobby computing that existed before Apple, IBM and Microsoft pushed it into the mainstream. It is [...]

iOS 6 Clock: Time is Money Embroiled in a never-ending litany of litigation over patents protecting their smartphone design, Apple ended a potential dispute over its iOS 6 clock design almost as quietly as it arose. A few weeks ago, SBB “politely complained” to Apple about the infringing use of its trademark-protected clock. On Friday, [...]