On May 20, 2013, new rules of practice and procedure go into effect for International Trade Commission Section 337 Investigations, 19 C.F.R. Parts 201 and 210. Many of these rule changes were made for the purposes of making technical corrections or clarifications to the rules and will have little direct impact upon a complainant or respondent’s strategy in navigating through a Section 337 Investigation. However, some of the changes to the rules, particularly those changes to the rules governing the initiation of an Investigation (§210.12), the termination of an Investigation (§210.21), and the scope of discovery (§210.18), are worthy of attention.
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The Supreme Court ruled unanimously May 13, 2013 in favor of Monsanto in Bowman v. Monsanto, a case involving Monsanto’s recombinant, Roundup Ready® seeds. The opinion rejected the arguments from petitioner, Indiana farmer Vernon Hugh Bowman, that Monsanto’s rights in its seed had been “exhausted” by their first sale (here, to a grain elevator) and that the Court should reject any “special exception” to the first-sale doctrine of patent exhaustion for “self-replicating technologies.”
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As part of new rules introduced by the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act (AIA), a new section that defines a “micro entity” was added to Title 35 of the United States Code. As a subset of small entity status, micro entity status grants an applicant a seventy-five percent reduction of fees associated with filing, searching, examining, issuing, appealing and maintaining patent applications and patents. The new section sets forth procedures pertaining to claiming micro entity status, paying fees as a micro entity, notifying the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) of loss of micro entity status, and correcting erroneously paid fees. An applicant has two options for qualifying as a micro entity, which are provided in 35 U.S.C. §§ 123(a) and 123(d) (and implemented in 37 C.F.R. § 1.29). Each is addressed in this article.
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On March 16, 2013, the final (and most significant) portion of the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act (AIA) took effect, and the United States broke from a first-to-invent regime to a first-inventor-to-file (FITF) regime. Of course, this break is far from clean as applications filed before March 16, 2013, as well as certain applications filed after March 15, 2013, will continue to enjoy the advantages of the old first-to-invent system. Since the AIA was enacted on September 16, 2011, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has played an important role in implementing the new patent law. In the eighteen months between the statute's enactment and the March 16 effective date, the USPTO published twelve notices of proposed rulemaking, issued a patent trial practice guide, and published a guidance document on the FITF provisions of the AIA, all of which culminated in the revision of the rules of practice in title 37 of the Code of Federal Regulations (C.F.R.). Set forth in this article are a few rule revisions that practitioners should pay careful attention to as we proceed into the FITF regime.
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Since President Obama entered the White House in 2009, his administration has undertaken a number of steps toward stricter policing of international trade secret misappropriation. Those efforts reached a turning point early this year with the release of the “Administration Strategy on Mitigating the Theft of U.S. Trade Secrets.” At the same time, however, news reports have suggested that the Chinese government has facilitated – and even been responsible for – the misappropriation of U.S. trade secrets. As a result, the Obama Administration has ramped up efforts to protect trade secrets against Chinese misappropriation.
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