Daily Dose of IP is presented by patent attorney Mark Reichel of Ice Miller LLP. At Controversial Patent Upheld in Amended Form, Reichel discusses and gives relevant links to the "frozen sperm" patent of XY Inc. of Colorado, showing the lengths to which the issuance of patents has extended.
Reichel in USPTO Announces New Duty of Disclosure Declaration Requirement points to the new disclosure rule effective June 1, 2008 requiring the use of the phrase "material to patentability" rather than "material to the examination" in complying with the declaration requirement in 37 CFR 1.63(b)(3). See in this regard also Peter Zura's 271 Patent Blog, PLI Patent Blog, AGIP News, Patent Docs, and Patently-O.
Deal Attorney is a blawg by Pittsburgh M&A lawyer Anthony Cerminaro "focused on mergers, acquisitions and other domestic and international commercial and financial transactions". The Law Pundit spent a summer in Shadyside, Pittsburgh (see also Think Shadyside!) in his student days (1966, the year of Wild Thing by the Troggs) selling Fuller Brush door to door in Penn Hills when he was not playing golf at the municipal North Park Golf Course in Allison Park, north of Pittsburgh. We have been Steelers fans ever since.
Anthony has some Troubled Tech Company Due Diligence Tips.
Deeplinks blog from the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) provides "Noteworthy news from around the Internet." See Total Election Awareness (TEA) for a new development in election monitoring.
Delaware Law Office is a blog by Attorney Larry D. Sullivan. He has a nice posting with links to all of the platforms of the 2008 Presidential candidates.
Dennis Kennedy, one of the pioneers of blawging, writes in his "Blawgiversary" birthday posting "If someone asked me what has changed the most in the world of blawgs in the last five years, I'd have to say that things have gotten a LOT more serious and focused."
Laura Quilter blogs at derivative work "a reality-based, fantasy-influenced journal on information, autonomy & the world". In her posting circuit split on sex toys, she writes: "I really wish that we could have a penumbra of no stupid laws." [I have added the explanatory link in that quotation]
We have an opinion on that:
There are more than 6 billion human beings on this planet and 99.99% got here the old-fashioned way. Look at the running stats on this Poodwaddle World Clock:
Unfortunately, after reaching the age but apparently not the maturity of true adulthood, many human beings seem go into a form of psychologically curious and intellectually banal denial of the facts of life. At the level of the legal system, this inability to deal at the adult level with human origins manifests itself in what derivative work rightly calls stupid laws.
But the problem is much deeper than that and is epitomized in the very fact that the leading religious figure of Western civilization is claimed to have been an immaculate conception, i.e. not created in the old-fashioned way, which itself is viewed by the believers to be original sin.
Small wonder then, that the first alleged humans, Adam and Eve, are claimed not to have been created the old-fashioned way either, but are to have appeared on the Earth instantaneously, by spontaneous generation, without being born or having parents or having a childhood or going through the process of growing up into adulthood. What an unhappy pair such a couple would have been, had they existed, without a past, without a language, without any of the things that, in course of time and in a process of many years learning, actually fashion a real human being. Creationism essentially denies the origin of man and woman by the old-fashioned way. Creationist belief is therefore psychologically an unwillingness to accept human origins the way that they really are.
Added to that are ancient practical considerations and taboos which developed in epochs prior to modern contraceptives as means of trying to keep populations at levels which could be supported by the society in question. Strategies of social survival were developed - in days when they were needed - that emphasized seriousness and abstinence (e.g. the Victorian age) as contraposed to fun and promiscuity (the Modern age), where the latter would inevitably lead to massive population increase.
Nowhere is this more apparent in the modern world than in America, where a long-outdated once-sensible Puritan ethic on genetic exchange still wields its ancient prohibitive hand, especially in the Bible Belt.
Lastly, and here we are somehow reminded of the phrase that you can tell the size of the boys by the size of their toys, there can be no doubt that the vices of envy and jealousy are widespread among humanity and that the virtues of charity and not begrudging another's joy and pleasure are not widespread, for which reason the prohibition of the toys of another creates in many persons a form of vicarious satisfaction which substitutes for the satisfaction that their own abstinence prohibits.
This is, for example, visibly at the root of the current new tyranny against the smokers of this world. First, containers containing tobacco products were marked with increasingly larger and increasingly more paternalistic and shameful messages to an audience who largely ignored them. When that did not work, prohibition again raised its ugly head. How fondly mankind prohibits someone ELSE from doing something, and perhaps this is a form of subliminal revenge against the dictates of childhood experience AND adulthood necessity, where abstinence and doing without are often the hallmarks of existence.
Few actually care about the health of any specific person affected by non-smoking laws. Rather, the joy is in imposing one's own "better-knowing" will on another, especially if that other person is denied a pleasure, a pleasure which that other person should know is inimical not only to his or her own interest, but also to those in the surrounding environment. And if no understanding is achieved, then the pleasure-seeking offender will be forced to toe the politically correct line, like it or not.
It is an erroneous assumption of law to believe or to expect that laws are passed for the good of those upon whom the laws are imposed. Quite the contrary, laws are imposed primarily for the good of those who are doing the imposing - and in case of a dispute - the imposer generally wins.
Dorf on Law (Professor Michael Dorf at Columbia Law School). Dorf in his right column continues to feature When Sex Counts: Making Babies and Making Law (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, directly from the publisher) by Rutgers Law Professor Sherry Colb. Gender, sexuality and reproduction remain great mysteries on the American scene and there is always a market for books that elucidate these troublesome topics.
There is a useful posting on Dorf's blog by Cristie Ford on Superdelegates and free agents for a possibly brokered Democractic Party convention.
Droit Commun (Community Law) is a blawg in French.
Droit.org is a portal for French law.
We might mention in this connection that LaRevue, a French language law blawg by Hammonds Hausmann in Paris, has several English-language .pdfs which are quite useful to examine for French law in English. The individual links are:
Issue 1
We quote from Hammonds Hausmann: "This is the first issue of our newsletter in English. It is based on articles and clippings released in our French edition which is published monthly and aims to provide our readers with an update of legal issues and news from Hammonds' Paris office."
Issue 2
Issue 3
Issue 4
Issue 5
