The Gulf Cooperation Council Patent Office (GCCPO) is open for business again. The GCCPO is the fifth-largest regional patent office within the informal international patent system. Its six-member countries include Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) introduced a new program for first-time patent filers on March 9, 2023. Through the program, qualifying applicants can file a petition to expedite the examination of their patent applications so that the applications have the potential to be granted sooner than a typical patent application.

The European Patent Organisation is the second largest multi-national patent organization in the world. Through one of its two organs, the European Patent Office (EPO), applicants can submit a single patent application that can be the basis for obtain patent protection in 39 member states.

The city of Hong Kong is located within a special administrative region of China on the eastern Pearl River Delta in South China. The city became a British Colony in the early part of the 19th century until it was transferred to China on July 1, 1997.

The federal court system provides parties with the opportunity to engage in a broad level of discovery. Discovery is the formal process through which litigation participants exchange information that is relevant to the case. As a result, many plaintiffs will avoid doing extensive pre-planning before bringing a lawsuit and rely on the ability to obtain broad discovery, to their detriment.

You filed your patent application. You waited 18 months and received a rejection. You called up your patent lawyer, and she explained to you how you are going to respond.

Conservative talk show host Laura Ingraham published a book titled Shut Up and Sing, which was directed at celebrities who expressed their opinions on various political issues. The phrase sort of became her tagline.

If you read this blog, you will notice that I tend to write a few posts about Supreme Court opinions in intellectual-property (IP) cases. The Supreme Court usually issues at least three to four IP opinions in a year. These opinions are often issued in May or June of a given year, right before the Court’s term ends.

I discussed the two-prong test for the on-sale bar in my Feb. 17, 2022 blog post. The two-prong test for the on-sale bar indicates that a patent claim will be invalid when...

Venue in patent-infringement lawsuits continues to be a heavily contested issue. As I indicated in my June 29, 2017 blog, the Supreme Court made a major change to patent law by narrowing its interpretation of the patent venue statute, 35 U.S.C. § 1400, in TC Heartland LLC v. Kraft Foods Group Brands LLC, 581 U.S. ___ (2017).