Patent Archives - Joshua D. Waterston, Esq.

U.S. v. Arthrex: A Battle for Power over Patent Judges

Joshua D. Waterston, Esq.2021-08-31T17:49:02-04:00February 26th, 2021|Intellectual Property, Patent|

One of my favorite aspects of the law is that something can be standard practice, or settled law, until a creative lawyer or court pulls it apart, turns it on its head, and a new paradigm is born. Think of Brown v. Board of Education, Miranda v. Arizona, or Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. Each of these decisions upended the prior paradigm. A new case may be joining this list: United States v. Arthrex Inc. At issue is where the administrative patent judges of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office fall within the U.S. Constitution: are they “principal officers”, [...Read More...]

Cease and Desist Letters – What Would Bill Murray Do?

Joshua D. Waterston, Esq.2020-09-30T10:49:03-04:00September 29th, 2020|Contracts, Copyright, Intellectual Property, Patent, Trade Secrets, Trademark|

In the world of intellectual property, the "Cease and Desist" letter is king. These are letters from attorneys for the owner of a work or invention, sent to an alleged infringer of the owner's intellectual property rights. The letters cite the legal basis for their claim, may threaten doom, destruction, and huge financial damages, and are often quite stern. Overly aggressive cease and desist letters can backfire. The Lumen Database website (originally chillingeffects.org) began as a project to track overzealous use of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's enforcement mechanisms, spotlighting the most egregious examples of cease and desist letters. Such [...Read More...]

The KosherSwitch Patent: Protecting malfunction by design

Joshua D. Waterston, Esq.2019-12-27T19:19:49-05:00December 27th, 2019|Intellectual Property, Patent, Trademark|

Here's a challenge for these modern times: How do observant Jews follow the Biblical commandment to observe the Sabbath? Rabbis generally agree that driving is prohibited, and that using electricity is not prohibited - but using switches to manually turn the flow of electricity on or off is prohibited. This is why you may have seen refrigerators or ovens with a "Sabbath mode", which prevents certain functions from working on the Sabbath. By contrast, light switches don't have such a mode; they are either on or off. Which brings us to the KosherSwitch and the concept of random chance. In [...Read More...]