I always learn from Cory Doctorow.

Here’s his Cambridge Business Lecture, entitled “Life in the Information Economy.”

Give it a listen!

Bill Patry has closed his blog.

We’ve lost a strong, scholarly, and sane voice.

I missed this one in March, but, happily, my Westlaw tracking just picked it up …

In March, Judge Camp, U.S. District Judge for the Northern District of Georgia, issued his opinion in a bench trial in a patent case.  Among the issues Judge Camp decided is whether Kleen-Tex’s asserted claims would have been obvious.  Judge Camp’s opinion is a model of clarity and thoroughness.  If you want to see nonobviousness analysis at its careful best, you can’t do better than Judge Camp’s Kleen-Tex decision.

Lucky for us, it’s available as a pdf through the good work of Coby Nixon’s excellent Georgia Patent Law Blog.  He summarizes Kleen-Tex here.

In sum: Read Kleen-Tex.  And check out Nixon’s blog!

You’ve heard of the microblog Twitter, right?

I’ve set up an account there for very short entries about patent law.  It’s at http://twitter.com/fireofgenius

Let me know if you’re also twittering …

New York Law School professor James Grimmelmann has written a wonderful, much-needed online essay entitled “Copyright, Technology, and Access to the Law: An Opinionated Primer.”  It’s available here.

Here’s the opening paragraph:

Recently, the state of Oregon has used copyright law to threaten people who were publishing its laws online. Can they really do that? More to the point, why would they? This essay will put the Oregon fracas in historical context, and explain the public policies at stake. Ultimately, it’ll try to convince you that Oregon’s demands, while wrong, aren’t unprecedented. People have been claiming copyright in “the law” for a long time, and at times they’ve been able to make a halfway convincing case for it. While there are good answers to these arguments, they’re not always the first ones that come to hand. It’s really only the arrival of the Internet that genuinely puts the long-standing goal of free and unencumbered access to the law within our grasp.

As the saying goes, read the whole thing!

Are you curious to know the bottom-line outcomes in the 17 published post-KSR Federal Circuit cases that conduct a nonobviousness inquiry? The below picture sorts the results in a crude, but (I think) interesting way. [ Note (with a hat tip to my anonymous commenter: This count doesn’t include summary affirmances.  One can’t know what issues were considered in such a case without reading the appeal briefs in the case, and I haven’t done that. ]

Last October, we hosted an interdisciplinary conference about nonobviousness, here at Lewis & Clark Law School.

Several of the papers from the conference have now been published in the Lewis & Clark Law Review. You can snag pdfs of the articles at http://www.lclark.edu/org/lclr/current.html

It’s an interesting collection of psychologists, lawprofs, and an economist. I hope you’ll take a look.

Yesterday, the district court granted summary judgment in favor of promotional CD reseller Troy Augusto on his copyright exhaustion claim.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, representing Augusto, has posted a pdf of the opinion here.

Those who wonder whether purported licenses on tangibles (”Not for resale,” etc.) can negate the exhaustion principle, in copyright or in patent, need to take a close look at Judge Otero’s analysis

The leading contemporary case citation for understanding whether a reference “teaches away” is In re Gurley, 27 F.3d 551 (Fed. Cir. 1994).  Looking over post-KSR cases about nonobviousness, I thought I was seeing it more than usual (along with discussion of a patentee’s “teach away” contention about a piece of prior art).

Well, here’s an almost certainly useless, but nonetheless amusing, contrast:

In the 4,702 days that elapsed between In re Gurley (June 15, 1994) and the Supreme Court’s decision in KSR (April 30, 2007), the federal courts cited Gurley by name 62 times, i.e., about once every 76 days.

In the 406 days that elapsed between the day after KSR and today, the federal courts cited Gurley by name 13 times, i.e., about once every 31 days.

Hmm …  Could it be that, post-KSR, the “teaching away” question is more salient?

The Court’s unanimous, sole opinion in Quanta ends with the following summary paragraph:

The authorized sale of an article that substantially embodies a patent exhausts the patent holder’s rights and prevents the patent holder from invoking patent law to control postsale use of the article. Here, LGE licensed Intel to practice any of its patents and to sell products practicing those patents. Intel’s microprocessors and chipsets substantially embodied the LGE Patents because they had no reasonable noninfringing use and included all the inventive aspects of the patented methods. Nothing in the License Agreement limited Intel’s ability to sell its products practicing the LGE Patents. Intel’s authorized sale to Quanta thus took its products outside the scope of the patent monopoly, and as a result, LGE can no longer assert its patent rights against Quanta. Accordingly, the judgment of the Court of Appeals is reversed.

How’s that for concise?