Intellectual Property April09 News

The two-week campaign for Coke’s Powerade ION4 sports drink is said to have splashed photos of Gatorade bottles beneath bold slogans stating “Don’t settle for an incomplete sports drink”. Pepsi Co. has retaliated and accused Coco-Cola of “false advertising, trademark dilution, deceptive acts and practices, injury to business reputation and unfair competition” under the Lanham Act.

WIPO has chosen April 26, 09, the date on which the Convention establishing WIPO originally entered into force in 1970 as World Intellectual Property Day. This year the focus of the WIPO is on promoting green innovation. The purpose of World Intellectual Property Day is:

• to raise awareness of how patents, copyright, trademarks and designs impact on daily life;
• to increase understanding of how protecting IP rights helps promote creativity and innovation;
• to celebrate creativity, and the contribution made by creators and innovators to the development of societies across the globe;
• to encourage respect for the IP rights of others.

The United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas has ruled in favor of OPTi Inc. holding that Apple Inc. willfully infringed OPTi Inc.’s patent, No. 6,405,291, titled, “Predictive Snooping of Cache Memory for Master-Initiated Accesses.”

“In the matter of Apple’s defense that OPTi’s patent was invalid due to obviousness, the jury ruled that OPTi’s patent was valid; In the matter of Apple’s defense that the patent was invalid due to anticipation, the jury ruled that the OPTi’s patent was valid; In the matter of damages, the jury awarded OPTi $19 million for Apple’s infringement of OPTi’s patent.”

Nadia Suleman, the mother who gave birth to eight children has recently filed two trademark applications with the USPTO. The first application filed is for the mark ‘Octomom’ filed under ‘entertainment’ and the second application is also for the mark ‘Octomom’ filed for ‘dresses, pants, shirts and diapers’.

Authernative Inc., a provider of innovative software security solutions such as user authentication and embedded encryption key management solutions has been granted a new patent by the USPTO on “Communication Session Encryption And Authentication System”

“The patent’s Message Encrypt/Decrypt Iterative Authentication (MEDIA) protocol achieves mutual authentication while assuring that the parties’ actual shared secrets (authentication credentials) never cross un-trusted communication lines.”

A federal jury in Rhode Island awarded Uniloc USA, damages from Microsoft for willfully infringing Uniloc’s patents for detecting software piracy.

In response Microsoft has said, “We are very disappointed in the jury verdict. We believe that we do not infringe, that the patent is invalid, and that this award of damages is legally and factually unsupported. We will ask the court to overturn the verdict.“

The Federal Appeals Court has stated that the Qiagen NV unit Digene Corp.’s for ‘test for the cancer-causing human papillomavirus’ was not infringed by Third Wave Technologies Inc. In doing so, the Federal Appeals Court upheld the decision of the district court and denied the appeal.

The US senators are said to have agreed on what would constitute the key issues on patent litigation reform. Although the reforms have not been formally announced, Senator Arlen Specter states that he believed they were on the brink of accomodation. The committee is said to reconvene and come to a conclusion on the finer details soon. The patent reforms have been said to amend patent law significantly.

The US.Copyright office is said to have increased the fee for certain registrations. The basic fee of $35 for a claim to copyright will remail the same. However, the fee for paper filings is said to have increased to $65. The change will come into effect on August 1.