My last column was the first of two columns discussing some of the most common misconceptions or myths about patents. Here is the second part, starting with number five on my list. 
Inventors and patent owners often assume that a patent
Patent law is a complicated area of law governed by a confusing set of statutes and regulations that are interpreted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) and the federal courts. Patents themselves are sometimes almost unintelligible and, if intelligible, may require many hours of reading to understand. It is no wonder that
Patent owners can no longer restrict the use of their patented products after the products are sold. Under the doctrine of patent exhaustion, a patent owner’s rights are “exhausted” once the patent owner sells the product. In Impression Products v. Lexmark International, Inc., 2017 U.S. LEXIS 3397 (May 30, 2017), the Supreme Court expanded
*This line is the title of a song written by Peter Allen and Carole Bayer Sager that was performed in Bob Fosse’s movie “All that Jazz.” The song was a hit, and the phrase has a lot of relevance to everyday life, but the Federal Circuit isn’t buying it.
In RecogniCorp, LLC v. Nintendo Co.
Apple just escaped a $533 million jury verdict by invalidating the plaintiff’s patents on the grounds that the patents cover abstract ideas.
The case is Smartflash, LLC v. Apple Inc., decided by the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals on March 1, 2017. Smartflash owned three patents for technology that limited Internet access to data (video,
