According to an article in Haaretz.com, Israel has reached an agreement with the United States over intellectual property rights, after a decade of disagreement. Industry, Trade and Labor Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer said yesterday that the two countries have reached an understanding which will remove Israel from the blacklist of nations that violate intellectual property rights. This has been an agreement that has been 10 years in the making.
The USPTO has shut its doors February 8 - 11, 2010 due to the record snow fall in the WashingtonDC region. They are expected to reopen tomorrow, February 12, 2010.
According to a press release issued by the USPTO yesterday (February 1, 2010) in response to President Obama’s 2011 Budget - USPTO Director David Kappos announced that the USPTO will be hiring 2,000 patent examiners (1,000 in FY 2011 and 1,000 in FY 2012) over the next two years.
These examiners will be “former patent examiners and IP professionals who will require minimal training and can be productive virtually from the start of their employment”.
Read the entire press release at the following link:
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office got a big budget bump in the president’s budget proposal released on Monday.The PTO, which charges fees but does not always get to keep all of the money, was given a budget of $2.322 billion for the 2011 fiscal year beginning Oct. 1, up 23 percent from 2010’s expected budget.
“The President’s Budget gives the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) full access to its fee collections and will strengthen USPTO’s efforts to improve the speed and quality of patent examinations through a fee surcharge,” the White House said in budget documents.
“The budget includes a proposal to increase statutory patent fees by 15 percent, which is expected to yield over $200 million in additional collections in 2011. The increase is intended to be an interim measure,” budget documents said.
President Barack Obama’s proposed budget said the PTO would develop a new fee schedule that better aligns fees to the cost of providing services.
In the past two fiscal years, the patent office earned more in fees than it was allowed to keep despite a problems like taking an average of 34.6 months to approve or reject a patent application.
In 2009, the patent office used $1.9 billion in funding and gave back $2 million additional that it earned in fees. For the 2010 fiscal year, it is estimated that the PTO will have access to slightly less but earn an additional $116 million in fees.
In other years, Congress had set the patent office budget at the same amount as the agency’s expected intake plus a cushion of $100 million. But Congress cut the cushion for fiscal 2010, that ends on Sept. 30. (Reporting by Diane Bartz; Editing by Tim Dobbyn)
According to China’s State Intellectual Property Office (SIPO), they received more than 976,000 patent applications last year (2009), up nearly 18 percent year from 2008. These figures included patent right of invention, utility model and design.
According to the State run IP Office, nearly 90 percent of them were domestic applications, the number which was up more than 22 percent year to year. The others were foreign applications which were down nearly 11%.
Ofcourse their is no outside verification of these numbers or any real way to check them, but it is an interesting bit of information.
The rest of the brief article can be seen by clicking on the following link:
I recently posted a brief quote from President Obama talking about Intellectual Property and the problems with China. I am now posting the President’s full comments (as released from the White House) in regards to the question that first initiated his response. Ofcourse, he was asked about patent protection from an individual inventor - who has much to loose if he is not able to fully trust that his proprietary technology is protected.
THE WHITE HOUSE - Office of the Press Secretary
For Immediate Release January 22, 2010
REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT
DURING TOWN HALL MEETING
LorainCountyCommunity College
Elyria, Ohio
1:45 P.M. EST
All right, gentleman right back here. Yes, it’s a guy’s turn. Yes, sir.
Q I’m an inventor, and I hold U.S. patent number 7,397,731.
THE PRESIDENT: Okay.
Q And before I ask my question I’d like to make a sales pitch. (Laughter.) If you can use my patent in your next election, I think you can raise a ton of money worldwide. You should take a look at it.
THE PRESIDENT: All right, we’ll take a look. All right.
Q If you can’t use it, the government could use it, and I could build a multibillion-dollar business here in Ohio. (Laughter.)
THE PRESIDENT: All right, we’ll take a look at your patent. Go ahead, what’s your question?
Q Yes, okay, it has to do with international patent rights. With all this free trade and trade barriers falling, it’s really hard for an individual like me with a global-scope patent to file all over the world and get patent protection everywhere, and having to go overseas to fight infringement. So if you’re going to drop trade barriers, maybe you can extend my patent rights to the foreign countries.
THE PRESIDENT: Well, this is a great question, and this is a huge problem. (Applause.) Look, our competitive advantage in the world is going to be people like this who are using their minds to create new products, new services. But that only helps us and helps you build a multibillion-dollar company if somebody can’t just steal that idea and suddenly start making it in Indonesia or Malaysia or Bangladesh with very cheap workers.
And one of the problems that we have had is insufficient protection for intellectual property rights. That’s true in China; it’s true for everything from bootleg DVDs to very sophisticated software. And there’s nothing wrong with other people using our technologies. We just want to make sure that it’s licensed and you’re getting paid.
So I’ve given instructions to my trade offices — and we actually highlight this at the highest levels of foreign policy — that these are issues that have to be addressed because that’s part of the reciprocity of making our markets open. And so when I met with President Hu of China, this is a topic that, at dinner, I directly brought up with him. And — but as you point out, it’s got to be sustained, because a lot of times they’ll say, yes, yes, yes, but then there’s no enforcement on their end.
And one of the things that we’re also doing is using our export arm of the U.S. government to help work with medium-sized businesses and small businesses, not just the big multinationals to protect their rights in some of these areas, because we need to boost exports.
Can I just say, we just went through a decade where we were told that it didn’t matter, we’ll just — you just keep on importing, buying stuff from other countries, you just take out a home equity loan and max out your credit card, and everything is going to be okay. And it looked, for a lot of people, like, well, the economy seems to be growing — but it was all built on a house of cards. That’s what we now know. And that’s why if we’re going to have a successful manufacturing sector, we’ve got to have successful exports.
When I went and took this trip to China, and took this trip to Asia, a lot of people said, “Well, why is he going to Asia? He’s traveling overseas too much. He needs to be coming back home and talking about jobs.” I’m there because that’s where we’re going to find those jobs, is by increasing our exports to those countries, the same way they’ve been doing in our country. If we increased our exports — our share of exports by just 1 percent, that would mean hundreds of thousands of jobs here in the United States. Five percent — maybe a million jobs, well-paying jobs. So we’re going to have to pry those markets open. Intellectual property is part of that process.
President Barack Obama was in Elyria, Ohio last Friday and spoke briefly on Intellectual Property, in response to a question from a participant in the audience. The President said that ensuring U.S. intellectual property was properly protected from theft was crucial in reviewing the country’s trade deals, citing China as part of this process. This is an important issue in states like Ohio that have suffered severe economic distress as a result of a decline in manufacturing and other consumer goods.
The President went on to say,”One of the problems we had was insufficient protection for intellectual property rights. That is true for China … these are issues that have to be addressed,”
According to an article in the AP today, insurance giant Mutual of Omaha has just settled its trademark fight with Oprah Winfrey and we are again reminded that you can trademark just about anything!The insurance giant has decided to settle its lawsuit against Oprah Winfrey’s production company over rights to the phrase “aha moment” (yep, I am not kidding).
Jim Nolan, a spokesman for Mutual, and Angela DePaul, a spokeswoman for Winfrey’s Chicago-based Harpo Productions Inc., would only say Monday that the case was resolved amicably. Documents filed last month in U.S. District Court in Omaha do not outline details of the settlement.
Mutual and Harpo began sparring earlier this year after Mutual starting using the slogan “official sponsor of the aha moment” in a national advertising campaign.
Harpo asked Mutual in a letter to stop using “aha moment” to promote its insurance and financial products because it didn’t want confusion about whether there was a relationship between Mutual and Winfrey. Winfrey’s representatives argued in April that the phrase was synonymous with Winfrey and her show. Winfrey often discusses “aha moments” - described on her magazine’s Web site as “those flashes of understanding” - with guests on her show.
Mutual responded with the lawsuit and documents showing it had obtained preliminary approval of a federal trademark.
The insurance company said it conceived its slogan in February 2008 and unveiled the Web site http://www.ahamoment.com a year later. It began researching trademark rights to “aha moment” in July 2008 and filed an application with the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office that August. Mutual said no opposition was made to its trademark application, and preliminary approval was granted in April.
Mutual originally asked the court for a legal declaration allowing it to use the slogan and pronouncing that Mutual has not infringed on Harpo’s or Winfrey’s rights. Harpo never filed a formal response to Mutual’s lawsuit.
Mutual asked for the lawsuit to be dismissed last month, and the judge entered his ruling Oct. 22.
