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Written by : Precious Kinzle |
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thanks for inviting me I'm gonna talk about a few issues that are relevant to intellectual property in the biotechnology area effectively each one of my slides has been a hour-long presentation for a different group so I'm going to go through 14 slides and roughly a half hours so I think perhaps you can take away a few things there there are these things out there called patents and the relevant to medicine and the relevant to research and relevant to biotechnology there was a recent Supreme Court case the Supreme Court doesn't hear many patent cases but when they do they tend to screw it up pretty badly but of course that's my opinion not necessarily that of the winner and then third thing could be that patent attorneys are actually pretty boring to listen to for a half hour but we'll see how that part goes so in order to set the stage a little bit how many people have heard of patents how many people know well that's pretty good do you know the difference between a patent and a trademark and a copyright or a trade secret or okay so I thought I'd go through real quick background on intellectual property basics again one slide talked a little bit about the history of the industry and biotechnology and pharma and the patents I've gotten and then talk about the recent developments and then give an unsolicited opinion on where things are going so basically four basic types of intellectual property trade secrets copyrights trademarks and patents and there are different types of patents trade secrets it's just something that's maintained as a secret it's not the same as being maintained as confidential it has to be maintained with secrecy such that maybe only two people in the company know or the Krispy Kreme donut recipe is a secret for example and only a couple key executives the krispy kreme know the entire recipe when they order ingredients they you know that one person order the flour and another order the sugar and they never get together on how much is coca-cola is another example they last forever as long as their secret if they lose their secrecy if the former employee discloses the secret it's gone forever so it's a great form of intellectual property as long as you can maintain the secrecy and you can't enforce it against anybody else unless they're trying to steal the secret so it's a little different copyrights works of original authorship manuscripts and structured manuals for your PCR machines software is copyrighted it's a form of intellectual property trademarks trademarks are marks or badges or logos on things that identify the source of the goods so if you see Roche their trademark you know that it's made by Roche molecular system if you see coca-cola you know that it's made by the coke company our coke is made by the coca-cola company so that brings us to patents which are distinct from all those three and each one of those is distinct and each one of them actually is almost a subspecialty within the intellectual property legal profession so I've given you to some of my knowledge on the last three but what I do is patents and you've all heard of patents patents have been in the news lately most of you've heard about Samsung losing a patent infringement lawsuit to Apple and the battles back and forth based on the iPhone that was actually on a design patent that patent will cover the outline of the phone there are hundreds of other patents literally they cover how the iPhone works those are called utility patent and those are the typical kind of pattern you'd find the biotechnology design patents protect furniture design the chairs in here have a design patent they can protect a consumer product like a blender but it's just a design it's not how it works then there's a fairly rare type of patent called the plant patent we're not going to talk very much about it but its covers a sexually reproducing plants like roses and if you ever have a desire to visit the Patent Office actually have kind of a neat room that's filled with all the Rose patents because I have submit color photographs so if you're into horticulture it's a convenient place to give it so in the US patents granted by the US Patent Office and it is a process here where you file an application and then the Patent Office takes a look at it in a process referred to as examination the process of applying and having an examined is referred to as prosecution in terms of the applicant or their lawyer prosecutes the application in the Patent Office until it becomes a patent the basic requirements for a patent are that it has to be patentable subject matter and that's actually what the change in the law talks about and there's been a change in that recently that's the development I want to talk about but the other requirements are that it has to be new you can't patent something that's not new and your patent has to be uh novice or not obvious over what was known before so probably you know determining whether something is obvious or not can be difficult and that's where most of the litigation and that's where most of the prosecution the arguments lie you know would would this invention been obvious if he knew about you know the three other existing technologies so that's primarily at ins last twenty years from the filing date they unless its design patent which is 14 years from the issue date and effectively utility patents if they issue in two or three years of prosecution they're roughly about seventeen years from the issue day this key point here the rights granted from the patent are the rights to exclude others from practicing the invention claimed in the patent and patent claims or written like metes and bounds property description it's a right to exclude others it's a right to keep somebody from walking on your property the real property analogy it is not however the right to do what you have patented a patent does not confer any right to the patent holder to actually make use of practice the invention and that right and I've highlighted it with red here but that issue is continually confused by everyone and all right so you've all heard me say that you you understand the distinction so how can one person get a patent and somebody else get a patent on the same are something very similar without the first patent rendering the second patent not new yeah I mean there there's usually a difference a good example would be and my favorite examples to use in these situations chocolate chip cookie I could have a chocolate chip cookie patent which comprise dough and chocolate chips let's say okay Ross could have decided that gee it would taste a lot better if you put pecans in it so he could get a patent as long as I hadn't disclosed or nobody had ever use pecans before and talked to chip cookie the covers dough chips and pecans Russ could never can't make his cookie because I have a patent that covers you know anything that as long as it only has dough and chocolate chips so the additional you know ingredient does not get them out of the scope of my path now in contrast just because I have a patent on chocolate chips and oh I can't put pecans in without infringing Rus
Thanks for your comment Rina Gracy, have a nice day.
- Precious Kinzle, Staff Member
Thanks for this interesting article
Thanks elanticoyoteR your participation is very much appreciated
- Precious Kinzle
About the author
I've studied indexer at Southern College of Optometry in Memphis and I am an expert in computer-aided engineering. I usually feel nerdy. My previous job was meter mechanic I held this position for 14 years, I love talking about distro hopping and dominoes. Huge fan of Zara Larsson I practice motorsport and collect scouting memorabilia.
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