Friday, September 7, 2012 by Catherine Clodfelter The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) announced changes to its fee system on Wednesday, reducing patent maintenance fees. This change is a part of a reform of the U.S. patent system that USPTO maintains is the “most significant of the U.S. patent system in more than a …
Wednesday, September 5, 2012 by Holly Bannerman Last month, a federal jury convicted House of Raeford Farms Inc., a North Carolina poultry slaughtering and processing facility, of 10 counts of knowing violations of the Clean Water Act. For nearly 16 months, blood, grease, and body parts from slaughtered turkeys were sent directly to the city …
Tuesday, September 4, 2012 by Laura Arredondo-Santisteban Earlier this year, Senators Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Chuck Schumer (D-NY) introduced into the House of Representatives and Senate a bill amending the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act called the Password Protection Act of 2012. The bill would make it a federal crime for employers to “knowingly and …
Tuesday, September 4, 2012, by Anne Marie Tosco The public may soon learn the details of the secret court ruling that the National Security Agency (“NSA”) violated the Fourth Amendment when it conducted illegal surveillance of e-mails and telephone calls. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (“EFF”), a non-profit defender of digital rights, sued the United States …
Tuesday, September 4, 2012, by Kelly Anderson Just over a week ago, the Securities and Exchange Commission approved new rules that could considerably impact the manufacturing process of numerous American electronic companies. Enacted “under the umbrella” of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, the new SEC regulations require companies to publicly disclose …
Monday, March 26th 2012 by Margaret J. Pishko By now, the Occupy Wall Street movement has become well known and widespread throughout in the United States. Claiming, “We Are the 99%,” this resistance movement seeks to “empower real people to create real change” in order to build a better society free of the “greed and corruption of the 1%.” …
Monday, March 26th 2012 by Panagiotis A. Papadopoulos Late last year, the Supreme Court heard arguments concerning U.S. v. Antoine Jones. To summarize the principal dispute, the defendant objected to the government’s us of a GPS tracking device installed on his car to track his movement for a month. The defendant, and a large number of concerned parties, believed that the …
Monday, March 26th 2012 by Tyler Hill Abstract The advent of social media in the workplace has triggered a host of newfound legal ambiguities that most recently have been illuminated in Phonedog v. Kravitz, a case that addresses the issue of who bears property rights in a Twitter account that was operated by an employee, yet for the …
Monday, April 2nd 2012 by Andrew D. Hennessy-Strahs Upon learning that facebook has reached a deal to purchase 750 patents from IBM, I initially rolled my eyes and assumed this is just another bit of facebook trivia – after all, I am sure most of us are still eagerly waiting for that facebook phone. Then, I started asking …
Monday, April 2nd 2012 by Aaron K. Reinhardt In 2011, President Obama signed the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act into law. The most striking change this law brings to the patent system is the change from a first-to-invent to a first-to-file system. While this change has certainly receives the most attention, it might not have the greatest …
