Source: http://ipbiz.blogspot.com/2005/07/
Timestamp: 2019-04-20 22:12:38+00:00

Document:
One or more computer readable media having stored thereon a plurality of instructions that, when executed by one or more processors, causes the one or more processors to perform acts including: receiving the audio portion of a sporting event; classifying a set of segments of the audio portion as excited speech; classifying a set of frame groupings as including baseball hits; combining the set of segments and the set of frame groupings to identify probabilities for each segment that the segment is an exciting segment; and saving an indication of the set of segments and the corresponding probabilities as meta data corresponding to the sporting event.
Note how "sporting event" shrinks into "baseball hits".
62. A system comprising: a feature extractor to extract a plurality of audio features from programming content; an excited speech classification subsystem to identify, based on a sub-set of the audio features, a set of segments of the programming content and corresponding probabilities that the segments include excited speech; a baseball hit detection subsystem to identify, based on another sub-set of the audio features, a set of frame groupings of the programming content and corresponding probabilities that the frame groupings include baseball hits; and a probabilistic fusion subsystem to combine the probabilities that the segments include excited speech and the probabilities that the frame groupings include baseball hits, and to generate a probability that portions of the programming content are exciting based on the combination.
A method for automatically summarizing a program, the method comprising: identifying a plurality of content-generic events from the audio of the program; identifying a plurality of content-specific events from the audio of the program; identifying portions of the program as a summary of the program based on the identified content-generic events and the identified content-specific events.
As to priority, this application claims the benefit of U.S. Provisional Application No. 60/153,730, filed Sep. 13, 1999, entitled "MPEG-7 Enhanced Multimedia Access" to Yong Rui, Jonathan Grudin, Anoop Gupta, and Liwei He, which is hereby incorporated by reference.
Hmm, the '956 application was filed March 4, 2005 (more than one year after 1999) and there are no other claims to priority.
A June 2005 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court2 should reduce patent gridlock in certain cases. The court unanimously allowed patented drugs to be used in preclinical studies [LBE note: recall footnote 6; the Supreme Court presumed that the CAFC decision did allow preclinical studies] to develop new drugs (but not for basic scientific research) without permission of the patent holder. The court said that its decision did not address whether research tools could be used similarly. Surprisingly, large pharmaceutical companies tended to side with consumer groups like AARP to support this decision, while smaller biotech companies as well as research universities tended to be opposed (due to legitimate fears that big pharma might not need to pay them for using their work in developing research tools, which will never generate revenue by being sold to patients as drugs).
This unanimous Supreme Court decision seems to open the door [LBE note: hmm, isn't this backwards?] to well-crafted legislation to further relieve patent gridlock, while also allowing the development of research tools to be profitable. For example, a compulsory-licensing system could create a medical patent pool, allowing big pharma, universities, or anyone else doing medical research to make free use of a broad class of patents, in return for a royalty based on sales, when and if any products developed with those patents were sold. Then any company or other organization could use almost any technology for medical research, without the hassle, expense, and delay of patent negotiation. This would free the research process, make royalties more predictable, and pay for innovation at the time of product sales -- after the work has already proven itself, and when a revenue stream exists. Paying for rights as a percentage of sales (instead of as a large fixed cost) could also encourage low prices in poor countries -- distributing research costs more equitably and realistically.
Stem cells cannot be obtained without destroying human embryos, which opponents of the research say is tantamount to murder. "An embryo is nascent human life," Mr. Frist says in his speech for July 29, adding: "This position is consistent with my faith. But, to me, it isn't just a matter of faith. It's a fact of science."
Separately, if the federal government were to enhance funding for stem cell research, there would be impact on the various state-sponsored initiatives, which grew in the face of the earlier federal restrictions. The way intellectual property plays out is likely different between the state areas and the federal area (controlled by the Bayh-Dole Act).
In Electromotive Div. of General Motors [GM] vs. Transportation Division of General Electric [GE], the CAFC re-visited the on-sale bar of Pfaff v. Wells Electronics, 525 US 55 (1998). Although the Supreme Court had suggested experimental use [by the patent applicant] was fairly straightforward, this case suggests otherwise.
At issue, was whether a commercial offer for sale had occurred.
Notice the CAFC states: "Few decisions address how to determine if a pre-critical date public use or sale is experimental... "
Here, the CAFC determines that a customer's awareness of the purported testing in the context of a sale is critical. This is consistent with In re Dybel, 524 F.2d 1393 (CCPA 1975).
For a determination of experimentation (and thus an avoidance of the on-sale bar), control and customer awareness ordinarily must be found.
The House IP subcommittee has decided not to meet this week [i.e., Friday, July 29] to mark up and approve patent reform bill H.R. 2795. The subcommittee will revisit the bill when Congress returns from its summer recess after Labor Day.
Hmmm, perhaps some time will be available to read "Patent Reform 2005: Sound and Fury Signifying What?", New Jersey Law Journal, IP Supplement, pp. 16-17 (July 18, 2005).
Disappointed that Congress is working against them to weaken America's intellectual property rights, the Professional Inventors Alliance USA ( http://www.piausa.org ) has launched an aggressive lobbying campaign to ensure the recently drafted "Patent Reform Act of 2005" never makes it to the House Floor for a vote. The U.S. Senate has scheduled a Hearing for the bill on Tuesday, July 26 and the House of Representatives has scheduled a Markup on Thursday, July 28.
Sponsored by Congressman Lamar Smith of Texas, the chairman of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet and Intellectual Property, the bill, if passed, would dull America's intellectual edge, disadvantage the nation's small businesses, cost Americans jobs and stifle individual ingenuity, say many of the nation's top inventors.
"The bill would strip individuals of their constitutional rights and kill American invention," said Ron Riley, the organization's president. "It is unconscionable that a member of Congress would sponsor such a bill, but more importantly it is clearly unconstitutional."
The bill's most controversial provision advocates replacing the United State's current first-to-invent standard with the European first-to-file model. The first-to-file system would no longer reward American inventors for their original ideas, designs and years of hard work. Instead, large companies - even foreign companies - that somehow learn of an idea that was not theirs to begin with could file before the actual inventor and claim the patent rights.
"Many of my colleagues don't have the financial resources to prepare a patent application as quickly as IBM, Microsoft or Hewlett Packard, much less win the race to the Patent Office," said Riley. "Unlike European and Japanese patent systems, America's system works to reward the individual inventor."
During a series of national meetings sponsored by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) several legal experts also questioned the constitutionality of not rewarding American's for their inventions. "Participants ... questioned whether a first-inventor-to-file system would be constitutional in light of the Constitution's requirement that Congress reward 'inventors,'" stated an FTC internal report dated May 23, 2005.
Recall "Patent Reform 2005: Sound and Fury Signifying What?" which appears on page 16 of the intellectual property supplement of the July 18, 2005 issue of the New Jersey Law Journal.
A patent application by Microsoft, Custom emoticons, US Appl. No. 20050156873 (published July 21, 2005) has gathered some publicity.
transmitting the character sequence to a destination to allow for reconstruction of the pixels at the destination.
Microsoft is garnering a lot of attention for filing for a patent on emoticons, the increasingly complex graphics that have become online shorthand for emotion.
“Microsoft has filed for a patent on the smiley face. No. Really,” wrote Pamela Jones of Groklaw, a popular blog devoted to issues surrounding open source litigation.
The patent application, which was made public [Thursday, July 21], actually addresses methods for speeding up the transfer of emoticons.
Much of the frenzied outrage mistakenly assumed that the patent had already been awarded, and that it covered all aspects of emoticons. But patent experts were skeptical about the emoticon patent application’s merit.
Those who regard patent examiners' work as indispensable to the nation's prosperity say USPTO's problem in retaining examiners is troubling. Some attribute the exodus to a culture of poor employee/ manager relations that a recent Government Accountability Office report highlights. Others say the problems are deeper and won't be fixed without restructuring the agency and the standards for awarding patents.
"I don't think I've ever seen a time when, in a concentrated two- or three-week period, I've heard about as many people either having left or planning to leave as I have now," said Ronald Stern, president of the Patent Office Professional Association, the union representing patent examiners.
Stern said GAO's auditors correctly described patent examiners' views in the June 17 report, which states that USPTO faces three challenges that could undermine its efforts to retain a qualified workforce.
The auditors concluded that USPTO's workforce problems arise from the lack of an effective management strategy for communicating and collaborating with examiners, outdated assumptions about production quotas that managers use to reward examiners and a lack of mandatory continued technical training for patent examiners.
Jon Dudas, USPTO's director, responded to the report by promising to stay focused on workforce and process improvements at the agency. He agreed with GAO's auditors on the need to develop a formal plan to improve communications between employees and managers. Dudas also told the auditors he would supplement current training opportunities with a formal program to help patent examiners stay current on state-of-the-art technology in their fields.
Stern said that strained employee/manager relations at USPTO stem from managers who "don't respect the input and advice they get from their employees." A related cause is patent examiners' discontent with what they say are unreasonable production quotas that examiners must work overtime to meet. "This is a legal sweatshop here," Stern said. "The truth is we could do a better job with more time."
According to the auditors' report, managers concerned about reducing a sizable backlog of patent applications want patent examiners to do their jobs faster without additional time allowances, citing advances in automation at the agency.
Patent examiners gave GAO auditors reasons why they require more time to evaluate patent applications than the people who are now USPTO's managers needed in the past. The time examiners have to review a patent application has not increased since 1976, even though examiners have many more complex cases involving, for example, computing innovations and biotechnology, than they did then, Stern said.
"Those are harder cases," he said. "The amount of prior art that has to be searched has gotten greater. The number of pages of specifications that somebody has to read is greater. The number of claims that an employee has to consider is much larger than it used to be. Those things all make it take more time. What has really happened is that people have been forced to do the job faster, and as a consequence, they've been forced to cut corners."
Jason Schultz, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who specializes in intellectual property issues, said the GAO report officially confirmed what he already knew about USPTO and its patent examiners.
The 85% grant rate number in the paper by Quillen et al. in the Federal Circuit Bar Journal (as well as the earlier 97% number) are based on bad math (the model allows a grant rate in excess of 100%) and bad legal assumptions (claims of a divisional application are NOT repeated attempts to claim the same subject matter of the parent). Nevertheless, the 85% number keeps coming up.
But see Cecil D. Quillen et al. 12 Fed. Cir. B. J. 35, 38 (2002) (suggesting that the PTO issues over 85% of all applications that are filed [sic]).
Harvard Business School Professor Josh Lerner testified to a House subcommittee on intellectual property that all parties have an incentive to ``invest in abusing the system,'' for inventors are ``induced to make marginal applications by the likelihood of success'' - 85 percent of 350,000 annual applications will be approved. Holders of the many marginal patents can then use them to force others to pay royalties they shouldn't have to, or even to stay out of the field.
The book by Jaffe and Lerner relies on Quillen's numbers. A paper in the Harvard Law Review in 2003 treated the 97% number as if it were the grant rate.
In the non-precedential Transonic v Non-invasive Medical Technologies, the Federal Circuit reversed a district court claim construction as to the term "calculating." The patent at issue was US 5,685,989.
The CAFC cited US v. Telectronics, 857 F.2d 778, 783 (CAFC 1988) and Bai v. LL Wings, 160 F.3d 1350.
Festo even came up, and the district court was instructed to do a Festo analysis.
US 5,685,989 has been cited by 39 US patents. One of the cites is by Jerome Lemelson, 5,919,135.
calculating the rate of flow of said shunt blood flow in said arterio-venous shunt from said measured amount of distinguishable blood characteristic.
Claim 1 recited a "pan for use with a commode," with some other limitations.
The Board found obviousness in view of US 2,500,544, 5,343,573, and admitted prior art [APA].
In my article "Patent Reform 2005: Sound and Fury Signifying What," I suggest that the proposed "first inventor to file" system might not be in the best interests of universities. The following article, posted today, confirms this.
Congress is tinkering with new rules that could reinvent the U.S. patent system, which brings in millions of dollars per year to UC Berkeley and other research universities.
Under the proposed law, a patent would go to the first inventor to file an application, the criterion used in most of the world's patent systems. The current U.S. system rewards researchers who can prove that they were the first to invent a device or process.
University of California officials have lobbied against the reforms, saying the first-to-file proposal could lead to shoddy research as scientists rush to beat the competition. The new law also would favor wealthy companies over public universities with limited budgets, said Carol Mimura, executive director of UC Berkeley's Office of Technology Licensing.
"If it's simply a race to the patent office, then whoever has the fastest DNA sequencer could win," she said. "From a scientific standpoint, it just doesn't feel fair."
University-generated patents have boomed since 1981, when Congress allowed academic institutions to license and commercialize new technology. The changes spawned a revolution in university research, somewhat shifting faculty away from their traditional focus on simply publishing their results.
Despite many universities' opposition to the new proposal, some say they would welcome the simpler patent process.
At private Stanford University, which produced 128 patents last year, officials say the proposal would save the school time and money. Institutions often have trouble defending patents against challengers who say they invented a product first, said Katharine Ku, director of Stanford's patent office.
"Frankly, academics do not keep very good notebooks, so we often lose these (challenges)," Ku said.
The 10-campus UC system, which produced 424 patents last year, has generated more inventions than any other U.S. university each of the past 11 years.
UC's 6,600 active patents earned the university more than $93 million in the 2003-04 fiscal year, officials said. The patent process, which often takes five years or more, is not nearly as lucrative for faculty, but they say it helps keep their research practical and timely.
"Getting involved in the patent process helps you understand how the business world works," said Moraga resident Richard Mathies, a UC Berkeley chemistry professor who has about 30 patents. "The more you interact with industry, the better you understand which technologies they need."
Although most inventions earn little or no income, the UC system earned at least $1 million per year from each of 10 inventions as of 2003. The system's most lucrative patent, a hepatitis B vaccine from UC San Francisco, brings in more than $20 million per year.
Other fruitful inventions include two different types of strawberry developed at UC Davis and the nicotine patch, from UCLA.
Some researchers are wary of having to rush to the patent office with half-developed ideas or the possibility that another person will beat them to a patent on which they have worked for years.
"It's easy to imagine how someone could get hurt," said Carlos Bustamante, a UC Berkeley biology and physics professor who helped invent an "optical tweezer" that can move individual molecules. "People in the university are primarily interested in research. We are not businessmen."
University officials say they are well aware their concerns about patent reforms are going to be outweighed by the needs of corporations that churn out thousands of inventions per year.
Large technology companies have lauded the bill as the best way to eliminate "patent trolls," companies that file for patents simply so they can sue others for infringement.
Intel Corp., which holds more than 10,000 U.S. patents and has another 10,000 in the approval process, has been stymied by patent trolls that "hold companies hostage," said Intel spokeswoman Jennifer Greeson. The company spends up to $20 million a year dealing with infringement lawsuits, she said.
"The impacts are that we are unable to proceed with patents," Greeson said.
The change is long overdue, said Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, the bill's author.
"I think it's important to have a (better) patent system because that's what keeps our economy going," he said. "We are now laboring under outdated patent laws."
University officials from around the country have lobbied Congress to ease the bill's effects on higher education, but the task has been difficult.
"At the end of the day, I think industry's voice will carry much more weight than ours will," said Scott Sudduth, UC's assistant vice president for federal governmental relations in Washington, D.C. "While we are relatively major players, this is a much bigger issue for them."
Even academics who oppose the first-to-file proposal in principle say they relish the thought of clarifying the process.
The differences between the United States' system and those of Canada, Europe and Japan can make life rough on inventors, said Brad Gibson, a chemistry professor at UC San Francisco and Novato's Buck Institute.
"Sometimes we lose the U.S. rights but keep the European rights, and it becomes a big problem," he said. "Anything that would simplify these rules, even though there would be some detriments, certainly would be a big help."
Several comments [in italics below] by Aslan Baghdadi in Legal Times in April 4 are worth considering in light of the July 12 decision.
to cover something not within the scope of the invention.
NOTE: AWH who was pushing the specification-centric approach, which was basically adopted by the CAFC, but AWH lost the case!
degrees cannot be "baffles," as that term is used.
angle to the wall. And most observers believed that Manthei (for Phillips) succeeded in getting the answer he wanted to that question.
NOTE: The result on July 12, 2005 confirms this observation.
circumstances of the specific case.
In addition, claim construction basics will be reconsidered en banc.
52 F.3d 967 [Fed. Cir. 1995] [en banc], aff'd, 517 U.S. 370 .
case," much like the interpretation of a contract or statute.
then-Chief Circuit Judge Haldane Robert Mayer in a harsh dissent.
"experimental use" defense under classic case law because of a perception that Federal Circuit case law denied the existence of a nonstatutory "experimental use"
sold commercially." Pfaff v. Wells Electronics Inc., 525 U.S. 55, 64 .
NOTE: The experimental use at issue in Pfaff pertained to activities by the patent applicant before patent grant. The experimental use that was at issue in the pre-1995 activities of Merck pertained to activities by a third party after patent grant.
Microsoft loses on an issue relating to 35 USC 271(f). Microsoft had invoked Pellegrini, 375 F.3d 1113 (CAFC 2004).
The decision contains the text: "possible loss of jobs in this country is not grounds for misinterpreting a statute", citing Griffin v. Oceanic Contractors, 458 US 564.
Enzo Biochem attempted to appeal a decision from SDNY, but the failure to have adjudicated the inequitable conduct claim led to dismissal of the appeal.
Case involving US 5,910,382 (LiFePO4 and lithium batteries) and Prof. John B. Goodenough.
Result: NTT appeal goes to CA5.
Cites Christianson v. Colt, 486 U.S. 800 and Univ. of Colorado v. American Cyanamid, 196 F.3d 1366.
According to a report by George E. Jordan in the July 12 issue of the Newark Star-Ledger, Able Labs altered test data to cover up production of tens of thousands of tablets and capsules that did not meet FDA standards. The company "cut and pasted" computer files and swapped sample vials to eliminate evidence of weak or superpotent medications.
Separately, the Star-Ledger also reported on the fraud of Suprema Specialties, who wowed Wall Street by creating a carousel of fake invoices and shipments. Forbes Magazine called the Paterson, NJ-based company one of the country's best small companies and Fortune ranked it among the fastest growing.
That Forbes and Fortune were taken in by what amounted to a street-corner shell game reminds one of how the scientific journals Science and Nature were fooled by the fraudulent and basically-nonexistent work of Jan-Hendrik Schon of Lucent (Bell Labs).
The fraud of Suprema (and of officers Cocchiola and Venechanos) cost stockholders 700 million. In the case of Schon, there were hundreds of millions of dollars of funding to followup the fraudulent work.
The en banc CAFC rejected the arguments of AWH in favor of a restrictive definition of the word "baffles." The summary judgment of noninfringement was reversed.
The en banc CAFC decided not to address the issue of deference to the trial court on issues of claim construction, which leaves the ruling in Cybor intact.
At page 21 of the opinion, the CAFC began its discussion of Texas Digital. At page 23, the CAFC stated Texas Digital placed too much reliance on extrinsic sources such as dictionaries. That approach improperly restricts the role of the specification in claim construction. Elevating the dictionary to such prominence focuses the inquiry on the abstract meaning of words rather than on the meaning in context of the patent. At page 31, the CAFC reaffirmed the approach to claim construction in Vitronics, Markman, and Innova.
One sees Innova was indeed favorably cited in the en banc Phillips case.
The case In re Steelbuilding.com presents a discussion of issues with generic and descriptive marks, and cites a number of useful earlier trademark cases, including Qualitex v. Jacobson, 514 US 159 (1995), In re Am. Fertility Society, 188 F.3d 1341 (CAFC 1999), and In re Oppedahl, 373 F.3d 1171 (CAFC 2004) and procedural cases, including In re Song Su Lee, 277 F.3d 1338 (CAFC 2002) and In re Thrift, 298 F.3d 1357 (CAFC 2002).
Here, the CAFC vacated as to generic but affirmed as to descriptive, lacking secondary meaning. There was a dissent on the latter point.
If you're looking to register a mark that is in the generic/descriptive range, this case is a helpful read.
Keep in mind the arguments for "patent harmonization" which underlie current efforts in US patent reform. There is (and will be) no harmony as to software/business method patents between the US and Europe.
Even after the EU Parliament's rejection of a controversial directive, the war of words rages on between opponents and proponents of software patents. Anti-patent campaigners today criticized the lobbyists in the other camp for "excessive spin doctoring".
Hartmut Pilch, the president of the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII), cannot see why the proponents of software patents would truly welcome yesterday's outcome: "No matter what the others say, article 52 of the European Patent Convention is still in force, and it clearly disallows patents on computer software. Our opponents wanted to dilute that article by means of an EU directive, and the headway they made amounts to zero."
"After they just wasted many millions of Euros on lobbying and public relations, they now want to soothe their bosses and clients by denying their all-too-obvious defeat", said Florian Mueller, the founder of the NoSoftwarePatents.com campaign. "If I had spent so much money, I'd want to walk out of the shop with something more than a failed attempt to enshrine software patents in European statutory law. They could have had that for free any time."
The pro-patent efforts had reached major proportions. Free ice cream to more than 500 people was actually one of the minor expenses. Pro-patent organizations hosted events in the European Parliament and various capitals of Europe on an almost daily basis for three months. They produced various videos; hired a former president of the EP (Pat Cox) and several high-profile PR agencies; placed a large banner on the front of a building close to the EP; and they had dozens of full-time lobbyists -- a number of them high-paid lawyers -- stationed in Brussels for months. One of the leading pro-patent campaigners had made himself a name with a 30-million Euro campaign for gene patents.
An article on nanotech, purportedly about patent problems with nanotubes, is illustrated with a buckyball (C60). Oh, well, ... If you can't tell the difference between a nanotube and a buckyball, you shouldn't be talking about nanotech patents.
But the situation is the reverse for carbon nanotubes, a leading candidate to be used in electronics as our ability to manipulate silicon reaches its limits [see "Supertubes," IEEE Spectrum, August 2004]. And that could turn the commercialization of carbon-nanotube electronics into a sticky mess. "If you pick up one of these patents, you're going to have to license a whole bunch of others in order to use the one that you've got," says Matthew Nordan, vice president of research at Lux Research. The best way for the industry to clear a path through the mess and get products out is cross-licensing, he says. And the best way to achieve this sort of arrangement is through organizations similar to the MPEG Licensing Authority, in Denver, Colo., a one-stop shop where consumer electronics companies can buy packages of digital coding licenses if they want to make, for example, a DVD player.
A system and methods are provided for training a trainee to analyze media, such as music, in order to recognize and assess the fundamental properties of any piece of media, such as a song or a segment of a song. The process includes an initial tutorial and a double grooving process.
Classifying information that has subjectively perceived attributes or characteristics is difficult. When the information is one or more musical compositions, classification is complicated by the widely varying subjective perceptions of the musical compositions by different listeners. One listener may perceive a particular musical composition as "hauntingly beautiful" whereas another may perceive the same composition as "annoyingly twangy".
Accordingly, there is a need for an improved method of classifying information that is characterized by the convergence of subjective or perceptual analysis and DSP acoustical analysis criteria. With such a classification technique, it would be desirable to provide training to humans at the front end of the classification process in order to generate more uniform human classification of media. It would be further desirable to provide a system and method as a result of which an individual is trained to analyze media, such as songs, in order to recognize and assess the fundamental media properties of any piece of media. It would be still further desirable to utilize a playlist generating engine to dynamically produce playlist(s) suited to the above need for training individuals.
determining based on said comparing a first group of said at least one fundamental property of the plurality of fundamental properties for which said trainee is qualified to code values for new media entities, wherein the media entities are one of song and song segments.
The double grooving phase leverages the skills of the experts that defined the canonical set of classification terms to ensure that new listeners, even though exposed to the tutorial, appropriately recognize all fundamental musical properties. Thus, for specific song examples, a new listener matches results with the system experts within a degree of tolerance e.g., 90-95% accuracy. When a high enough degree of cross-listening consensus is reached, the new listener becomes a groover.
This application is related by subject matter to commonly assigned U.S. Pat. No. 6,545,209, issued on a Apr. 8, 2003, entitle "Music content Characteristic Identification and Matching" and to the following commonly assigned U.S. Patent Applications: U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/900,230, filed on Jul. 6, 2001, entitled "System and Method for the Automatic Transmission of New, High Affinity Media;" U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/934,071, filed Aug. 20, 2001, entitled "Method and System for Providing Adaptive Media Property Classification;" U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/900,059, filed Jul. 6, 2001, entitled "System and Methods for Providing Automatic Classification of Media Entities According to Consonance Properties;" U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/935,349, filed Aug. 21, 2001, entitled "Systems and Methods for Providing Automatic Classification of Media Entities According to Sonic Properties;" U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/905,345, filed Jul. 13, 2001, entitled "System and Method for Providing Automatic Classification of Media Entities According to Tempo Properties;" U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/904,465, filed Jul. 13, 2001, entitled "System and Methods for Automatic DSP Processing;" U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/905,011, filed Jul. 13, 2001, entitled "System and Method for Dynamic Playlist of Media;" U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/942,509, filed Aug. 29, 2001, entitled "System and Method for Providing Automatic Classification of Media Entities According to Melodic Movement Properties;" and U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/928,004, filed Aug. 10, 2001, entitled "System and Method for Audio Fingerprinting," the contents of which are hereby incorporated into this present application in their entirely.
Gruskin and Bird have a paper in the June 2005 issue of Intellectual Property Today on the significance of the case Ex parte Eggert, 67 USPQ2d 1716 (BPAI 2003) as to valuable aspects of re-issue.
determinations are for Congress, and not the courts, to make. Plaintiff has not carried his burden of showing that Congress has behaved irrationally.
My article, Patent Reform 2005: Can You Hear Me, Major Tom?, appears on pages 32-34 of the June 2005 issue of Intellectual Property Today.
Certain issues with the brief in KSR International v. Teleflex of the 24 law professors concerning the motivation requirement in obviousness are addressed.
Edward Stanek, president of the Iowa Lottery and one of two men who came up with the Powerball game in 1992, has patented an international jackpot game and a new lotto game that could some day be played in the United States.
Stanek and Powerball co-creator Steve Caputo, the former Oregon lottery official, have never received royalties from their invention of Powerball. The game has generated about 17 (B) billion in sales for lotteries nationwide in the past 14 years.
Stanek is well paid, however, as the nation's senior chief lottery official.
He decided last year not to take early retirement and the state gave him an 81-thousand dollar pay raise.
Stanek is now one of the state's higest paid employees, with an annual salary of 207-thousand dollars.
creating a jackpot prize limit in one or more of the groups such that money in the super prize pool in excess of the jackpot prize limit is awarded as second subordinate prizes.
Many different types of lottery games have been sold over the course of history in various jurisdictions. The "traditional" game has been sold for several hundred years. This game is based on the concept of a raffle. Generally, tickets are sold with unique numbers. The drawing mechanism is developed, often using balls, sometimes thousands of them, each with a unique number corresponding to a ticket. Other times individual digits for winning numbers are drawn from a series of machines. The drawings are held so that a large prize and subordinate prizes are paid according to the unique numbers drawn and delegated to a particular prize level. Sometimes subordinate prizes are paid for matching part but not all of the numbers as long as the digits being matched are a subset of the digits on the balls drawn in exact order.
Instant lottery tickets, also called scratch tickets, were invented in the second half of the 20th century. They utilize a secure printing medium with numbers or symbols covered by latex or some other material. The covering is scratched and players win prizes by adding up, lining up, or matching covered symbols. Various patents have been issued relative to the substrate, security precautions, symbol coverings, and play styles for these types of games. They now account for roughly half of lottery sales in North America.
Another type of lottery ticket is the pull-tab ticket. It utilizes layers of cardboard glued together, with one layer having a series of perforations to form tabs. As the tabs are pulled away from the ticket they reveal symbols underneath and matching various combinations of symbols leads to the winning of prizes.
The last category of lottery type games are generally referred to as lotto games and are based on the concept of picking numbers. These games usually involve players picking their own numbers or using a computer or some other mechanism to chose the numbers, in an attempt to match the numbers against those drawn by the lottery. The lotto concept was originally developed in Italy about 1580. It evolved from bets being placed on which candidates were chosen at random to serve in the senate. The betting was so popular among the citizenry that the incidence of the drawings was increased and the names of senators changed to numbers.
One of the most successful lotto type games in modem times is commonly known as pick 3. Players choose three digits from zero to nine. The lottery chooses three digits from zero to nine. If the player's numbers match the lottery's numbers in exact order, a top prize is won. Other betting variations can be made where a player chooses to match the two front digits, the two back digits, the first and last digit, or some combination of the above. The game was typically run manually and illegally by crime networks for generations in large cities in the United States. State lotteries began to offer the game and computerized it so that it could be played efficiently on daily basis. A similar game has been developed for matching four digits.
Another typical lotto game in the United States and much of the rest of the world involves establishing a field of numbers from one to X. A player chooses, say, six of these numbers. The lottery then draws six numbers and a top prize is won if all numbers match in any order. The odds of winning the top prize can be altered by making X a larger number. In doing so there will be fewer winners of the top prize, which allows lottery sellers to offer a large jackpot prize. The prize can further be enhanced if no winner is chosen in a particular drawing. The lottery is then able to bank part or all of the non-won prize money from a previous drawing and offer it as an incentive for sales in a subsequent drawing, by increasing the size of the jackpot. In typical lotto games of this nature, subordinate prizes are also awarded for the matching of five, four, or even three of the six numbers drawn in any order. A typical prize structure for a pick 6 out of 30 game is to pay the jackpot prize if all 6 matches are correct, the approximate average odds of which are 1:593,775; pay $100 if there are 5 matches, the approximate average odds of which are 1:4,124; pay $10 if there are 4 matches, the approximate average odds of which are 1:144; and provide a free play if there are 3 matches, the approximate average odds of which are 1:15. Of course, the allocation of prize money to be divided is subject to selection or design for each ticket sold.
Keno is a lottery game in which the house draws a number of balls, say, from a group or field of balls that is larger than the number of balls selected by a player, but any match between the balls selected by the player to the balls drawn by the house counts. Lotto games are actually a subset of keno games; in lotto games, the number of balls drawn by the house or lottery equals the number of balls picked by the player.
In contrast, higher prizes can be offered by establishing a matrix of different size. If a game is chosen where the goal is to match 6 of 49, then a typical prize structure may be to pay out $2,000,000 if there are 6 matches, having an approximate average number of prizes for each drawing of less than one; $65,816.40 if there are 5 matches and a match with a bonus number, having an approximate average numbers of prizes for each drawing of 8; $1,784.80 if there are 5 matches, having an approximate average numbers of prizes for each drawing of 236; $68.10 if there are 4 matches, having an approximate average numbers of prizes for each drawing of 11,857; and $10 if there are 3 matches, having an approximate average numbers of prizes for each drawing of 213,760. A variation of this game with smaller top prizes but better odds is a pick 5 game, a game involving matching five numbers by the player's choice in the drawing in any order. There is also a variation with seven numbers.
Another variation on this concept has emerged in the last decade, typically called "rolldown" in the United States. In a rolldown lotto game everything proceeds as in a typical pick six or pick five lotto game, as above, except that in the event that there is no jackpot winner, prize money that has not been won is allocated to smaller prizes rather than being banked to enhance subsequent jackpots. Therefore the lack of a jackpot winner provides money to enhance the size of the prizes for lower tier winners. A typical prize structure and relative occurrences for a pick 5 out of 55 rolldown game may be to pay the jackpot if all 5 numbers are matched, the probability of which is 1:3,478,761; pay $500 if 4 numbers are matched, the probability of which is 1:13,915; pay $10 if 3 numbers are matched, the probability of which is 1:284; and pay $1 if 2 numbers are matched, the probability of which is 1:18.
In some instances a bonus ball can be added to a lotto game to create a prize smaller than the jackpot prize but larger than any of the other prizes. So, for instance, in a pick six lotto game a player matches only five of the six numbers drawn by the lottery; however, the lottery has also drawn a seventh ball, the bonus ball, which if paired with any five of the six other numbers drawn by the lottery creates a prize intermediate between matching five and matching the six original balls drawn.
In the last decade a new high jackpot game was developed called Powerball® (Multi-State Lottery Association, West Des Moines, Iowa). It was emulated by the Big Game in the United States (now Mega Millions), by Powerball in Australia, and similar games introduced in other countries. Unlike lotto, where the player picks six balls from one to N drawn by the lottery, the player instead chooses five numbers from one to X, and one number from one to Y. The lottery then draws five numbers from one to X and one number from one to Y from separate drawing machines and prizes are awarded according to various matches. The Powerball® lottery game is a combination of two lotto games in one. Both games must be won to win the jackpot prize. It is also designed so that any player matching the single ball drawn from the one to Y device wins a prize. The concept has been extraordinarily successful. Table 1 lays out a prize structure applicable to a typical Powerball® lottery game.
On June 13, 2005, the presiding judge in the case in D. Mass. between Freedom Wireless and BCGI suspended the non-jury trial on inequitable conduct and ordered mediation between BCGI and the other co-defendants in the lawsuit and Freedom Wireless, Inc. In the event that the mediation is unsuccessful and the parties are unable to reach a settlement, the non-jury trial is currently scheduled to resume on July 14, 2005 and could last approximately one to two weeks after it commences.
(h) at least one prepaid calling card having an encrypted number which allows a set value of air time to be added to a prepaid subscriber account balance by entering the encrypted number into the prepaid subscriber's cellular radiotelephone.
modifying an account at the wireless service provider based on the user-input, wherein modification of the account comprises increasing a level of credit available for wireless telecommunications service by the predetermined level of credit.
Boston Communications Group Inc. [BCGI], a Bedford, MA wireless technology company, is fighting for its life. In May, a federal jury slapped BCGI with a $128 million judgment for infringing on a patent owned by a tiny Phoenix company that covers prepaid cellular calling plans. If upheld, the judgment, which is three times BCGI's market value, would almost certainly drive the 400-person company into bankruptcy.
BCGI is waging a long-shot battle to overturn the judgment, arguing it's a victim of an absurdly broad patent that never should have been issued.
Freedom Wireless, a four-person company, has never set up an actual business serving customers; it seeks royalties from companies like BCGI, Verizon Wireless, and Nextel Communications Inc. At the heart of Freedom's 1996 patent is the idea of using a computer to match a cellphone number with a database showing how many paid-up minutes the cellphone owner has, then deciding whether to complete a call.
BCGI gets sympathy from some top patent lawyers.
''Some of these claims are very, very broad," said Sarah Chapin Columbia, of Choate Hall & Stewart in Boston, which has no involvement in the BCGI case. Columbia, who reviewed the case at the request of the Globe, said the Freedom Wireless patent ''is a very good example of a very broad business-method-type patent of the type that would be very difficult to invalidate."
Joseph G. Hadzima Jr., a senior lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who specializes in intellectual property issues, said: ''You're going to see more of these cases, and they are going to get worse. You've got more and more of what we call 'patent trolls' that go and acquire IP just for the purpose of suing people."
One reason intellectual property specialists are so leery of business-method patents: It is almost impossibly difficult to document the so-called prior art, or what already existed when an inventor came up with a purportedly new idea. Finding evidence that a thing never existed -- such as a chemical compound -- is, as a rule, considerably easier than proving no one ever had a method of doing something.
US Representative Howard Berman, a California Democrat who has for years tried to change the patent process, refuses to take a yes-or-no position on business-method patents. But Berman has said ''we must pay attention to those who raise concerns about whether business method patents are being issued for obvious inventions, or for inventions determined to be novel, based on inadequate information about prior inventions."
BCGI and Freedom lawyers are preparing to meet this week in hopes of negotiating an alternative to the $128 million judgment, but have reported no progress in preliminary two-party talks. BCGI is set to return to US District Judge Edward Harrington's courtroom next week to argue that the Freedom Wireless patent should be invalidated, because its owners knew about but failed to give the Patent Office evidence that others had thought of the idea.
Freedom denies the allegation, calling it a standard sore-loser legal gambit.
Before BCGI rolled out its technology in 1996, prepaid wireless calling plans either required people to dial an 800-style number and then enter the number they wanted to reach, or buy a special phone that had the equivalent of a timer built in to shut off service when they used up their minutes.
Freedom's lawyer, William C. Price of Los Angeles, said the trial proved that Freedom had a patentable idea that BCGI violated.
''The best minds in the industry hadn't figured out how to do it" before Freedom's two inventors filed their patent, Price said.
''Once you see what somebody invented," Price added, ''it's easy to say it looked obvious in hindsight."

References: Application No. 60
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