Patent Search and Filing

Court delays Forest patent trial (Long Island Business News)
COMMACK – Pharmaceuticals manufacturer Forest Laboratories Inc. said Friday that the trial date of its patent lawsuit against Ivax Corp. has been delayed for three months.

RIM bows to Jpeg patent (Personal Computer World)
Research in Motion , maker of the popular Blackberry email device, has signed a licensing agreement with Forgent for a patent that covers the Jpeg image file format.

Sonic Solutions, a maker of digital media software, said Wednesday that a U.S. federal court has ruled that its products do not infringe on a patent owned by Optima Technology Corp…[more]

O2Micro® International Limited (Nasdaq:OIIM – News), a leading supplier of innovative power management, and security components and systems for the Computer, Consumer, Industrial, and Communications markets, received 45 claims under United States patent number 6,941,405 for its System and Method for Offloading Converter/Controller-specific tasks to a system microprocessor…[more]

BlackBerry maker RIM denied U.S. Supreme Court bid to block patent suit (Canadian Press via Yahoo! News)
TORONTO (CP) – Research In Motion’s stock hit a 17-month low Wednesday but bounced back quickly after the U.S. Supreme Court denied its request to stay lower-court proceedings in a patent dispute that threatens sales of the BlackBerry.

World officials debate breaking Tamiflu patent (USA Today)
The first line of defense against a bird flu pandemic is at the poultry farms of Southeast Asia, while the second line may come down to ethics and politics, said health ministers from around the world meeting in Canada. Officials debated breaking the patent on Tamiflu, known to be the most effective bird flu drug.

Local pharma group urges changes in patent law (INQ7money.net)
A GROUP of local pharmaceutical companies is pushing for changes in the Philippine patent law to allow them to conduct research and development on patented medicines even before the products’ exclusivity expires.

Four Japanese companies sued for MPU patent infringement (EE Times)
WASHINGTON Four Japanese electronics giants are the target of a patent infringement lawsuit filed Wednesday (Oct. 25) by a U.S. intellectual property management company.

Illumina Challenges Ownership Rights for Patent Covering ParAllele Technology Acquired by Affymetrix (Business Wire via Yahoo! Finance)
Illumina, Inc. announced today that it has made a formal filing with the United States Patent and Trademark Office requesting Interference with U.S. Patent Number 6,858,412. The ‘412 patent relates to the molecular inversion probe genotyping technology of ParAllele BioScience, which was recently acquired by Affymetrix.

Tech Notebook: Intel pays patent settlement (San Jose Mercury News)
How’s 17 years for a start-up’s payback time? It was a big surprise last week when Intel agreed to pay $300 million to former high-flier MicroUnity to settle patent claims.