Blog
Bayer Cropsciences v Dow Agrochemicals: Mistaken Identity as a Limit to Functional Claiming in Biotechnology
In 1989, Bayer Cropsciences filed the application that matured into US Patent #6,153,401, covering “[A] polypeptide having the biological activity of 2,4-D monooxygenase.” The enzyme they had discovered was capable of cleaving the popular herbicide 2,4-D into harmless...
Blackberry’s Go-Private Offer
In 2009, Blackberry dominated 47% of the US market. Today, it has barely over 2% of the US market. Its stock market value has fallen from $55 billion to less than 10% of that number, $4.6 billion. Last Friday, Blackberry announced an almost $1 billion loss for the...
New Zealand Changes Patent Laws to Exclude Software
The legendary Patent Troll Wars will not see much of a theater in New Zealand, after Parliament just this month determined that software is no longer able to be patented in New Zealand. New Zealand's Patent Act 2013 seeks to clean up the patent process by no longer...
Who Am I? Property and Privacy Concerns of the Future
Computers and the internet continue to revolutionize the ways we collect and distribute information. Many privacy concerns have accompanied these technological advancements. Earlier this year, in a New York Times article, some of these privacy concerns were made...
It’s the Sweetest Hat Ever!
The relationship between the developer of a show, book, or other story and a fan is usually pretty straightforward. The artist conceives, produces, and distributes a story, the fan consumes the story, and, if the fan really loves the story, consumes all sorts of...
Verizon v. FCC: Is Net Neutrality Down for the Count?
To preserve openness and a low barrier to entry, the Federal Communications Commission adopted the Open Internet Order (2010), establishing three rules for Internet Service Providers: Transparency: ISPs “must disclose” their practices and terms and conditions of their...
Changes in Where Patents are Granted
In case you haven’t seen it, WIPO has an interesting tool that allows you look at patent data for different years and different countries. I thought it might be interesting to look at how the industries receiving patents have changed over the last 30 years. The...
One Crucial Step to Regulate the Use of Bitcoins for Illegal Purposes
Virtual currencies have the potential to revolutionize how consumers buy, trade, and sell goods and services – and government regulators must be prepared to adapt to maintain their effectiveness. One such currency, the Bitcoin, has been featured prominently in the...
Dallas – Ideal City for Patent Professionals
This post is written by Yoon Chae, an Associate of Baker & McKenzie *Disclaimer: This article represents the opinion of Yoon Chae as an individual and not of Baker & McKenzie as a firm. For a patent attorney, working in a city exposed to diverse patent...
Tiffany & Co. Files Trademark Infringement Suit Against Costco
On Valentine’s Day, Tiffany & Co. filed a lawsuit in federal court against Costco, claiming that Costco engaged in “trademark infringement, dilution, counterfeiting, unfair competition, injury to business reputation, false and deceptive business practices and...
An Anniversary, and Asteroid Mining
This week Planetary Resources, a company that aims to mine asteroids, is celebrating their one-year anniversary. They are toasting the date with a Google Hangout on April 24th where they will, “provide a brief year in review, current status on the development of the...
Using Technology to Combat Human Trafficking
Human trafficking is a pervasive yet underemphasized issue that persists all around the world. The United Nations Global Initiative to Fight Human Trafficking estimate that millions of people are or have been trafficked into forced labor, and projects that, without...
USPTO denies Apple’s iPad Mini trademark
Recently Apple has been a prominent topic of discussion in intellectual property disputes. Most of the talk has been focused around various international disputes over Apple’s patents. The most recent topic, however, focuses on the US Patent and Trademark Office’s...
The F.A.A. Reassesses Electronics Restrictions
So why do they make us power down all electronic devices before takeoff? We have all heard the rumors that electronic devices interfere with the pilots ability to fly the plane but it turns out there is no proof that electronics actually affect avionics. To add to...
Welcoming Social Media Evidence into Family Law Cases
Family law is an area of law that is not typically mentioned in the same breath as technology. However, as internet use becomes increasingly pervasive, the separation between family law and technology is rapidly shrinking. Internet use, and social media use more...
Want Out of Sorting Through Physical Junk Mail: Try Outbox
The instant delivery of e-mail has left many wondering if mail delivered via the U.S. Postal Service is slowly becoming a dying breed. In an attempt to revolutionize the process of receiving snail mail, Outbox, a start-up company with customers in Austin, Texas and...
For those about to (Secure Intellectual Property Rights), We Salute You
Martin Guitars, a high-end acoustic guitar manufacturer (seriously, check out this one), began using a unique method of guarding against counterfeit- DNA identification. Martin partnered with Applied DNA Sciences in order to apply a unique Martin DNA symbol to each...
How Copyright Law Can Spur Innovation (Ridiculous, Expensive, “Rube Goldberg-ian” Innovation)
Recently, the Second Circuit denied a preliminary injunction motion raised by the plaintiffs in WNET, Thirteen et al v. Aereo. The plaintiffs, copyright owners all, had alleged that Aereo’s video-streaming and recording technology violated the public performance...
Maxis, Google, and the Rise of Services
Two stories in the past week have called attention once again to the growth of the service industry and a corresponding decline in the amount of products/property available to the public. Maxis, a video game developer and subsidiary of video game giant Electronic...
Judge cuts down Apple’s damage award by 450 million dollars.
In an interesting twist to the ongoing saga between Apple and Samsung, Judge Lucy Koh cut the damage award to Apple by over four hundred million dollars, reducing total recovery from 1.05 billion to 599 million. As a quick background, Apple sued Samsung for patent...
Should We Forget the Right to Be Forgotten?
While Facebook has had some recent success in Europe vis-à-vis its policies – this week winning a challenge in Germany against its “real names” policy – the EU currently has several proposals on the table that have the potential to seriously impact Facebook’s data...
Scroogled?: Microsoft’s Attack Campaign on Gmail
Microsoft has created a new ad campaign attacking Gmail. And for good reason: Gmail has 425 million active users as of June 2012. As of November 2012, the new Outlook has only 25 million users. Microsoft's campaign is striking on the fact that Gmail "scans emails" in...
Survey says nearly half of lawyers want to move key functions into “the cloud”
As more of our lives, and more of our work move into the digital realm, a Legal IT Professional’s survey indicates a split in the profession over whether firms should move key technology functions into “the cloud”. The survey’s sample size was fairly small (there were...
Selling Back Your Steam Games
This past July, the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled that digital software distributions services, such as Steam and Origin, cannot prevent users from reselling their digital copies of games, regardless of the EULA they signed. Using what seems similar to...
Posts on the MTLR Blog are editorial opinion pieces written by student-editors of the Michigan Technology Law Review. The opinions expressed in these editorial posts are not espoused or endorsed by the University of Michigan or its Law School. To view scholarly Articles and Notes published by the Michigan Technology Law Review, please visit the MTLR home page.