Law and Innovation

Fresh and interesting article posted on FOSS Patents about the Oracle v. Google Android-Java copyright case. The suspense was all killing us but yesterday the Supreme Court of the United States finally denied the petition for a writ of certiorari. Happy reading! "The copyrightability of code relating to Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) may elicit more heat than light from a small but vocal group of people. The Supreme Court of the United States, however, has not concluded that there is anything quite so special about the subject that Google's petition for writ of certiorari (request for Supreme Court review) in Oracle's Android-Java copyright case should be granted. At its Thursday conference, the court denied the petition, as just reported by Reuters court reporter Dan Levine on Twitter . And as he accurately noted , this is a "huge victory" for Oracle. The order list is now available online. On page 11 you can find this entry: 14-410 GOOG...

Fresh and interesting article posted on TechCrunch about Aereo's new plan to become a cable provider.  As a reminder, Aereo was se l ling a serv ice that allows its subscribers to watch television program s over the Internet a t about the same time as the prog rams are broadcast over the air. The system was made up of servers, transcoders, and thousands o f micro antennas housed in a central warehouse.Unlike video-on-demand services, such as Netflix, Aereo does not provide a prearranged assortment of movies and TV s hows ; it only trans mitted specific programs selected by the user. Happy Reading! "When Aereo was deemed illegal by the Supreme Court and paused its service last month , it seemed as if the TV streaming service was out of options. But on Wednesday, Aereo lawyers  filed a letter with a New York district court indicating that the company now considers itself a cable provider. It now believes that it should not have to stop its ...

One of the most important and complex patent cases has just come to an end. The U.S. Supreme Court, the highest court in the States, recently heard an extremely difficult biotech case: Assoc. for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, Inc ., No. 12-398, June 13, 2013 (hereafter 'Op.'). Its ruling is expected to have broad implications, not only in the U.S. but worldwide. The central question is: whether human genes could be patented? Put in a simple way: how genes, the basis for hereditary traits in living organisms, could become a company’s intellectual property; and who owns the gene?  In particular in the field of medicine, modern biotechnology is one of the key technologies of the 21st century, a major source of innovation and a global driver of economic growth. With annual net sales exceeding $90 billion, it's easy to understand the paramount importance of biopharmaceuticals to the pharmaceutical industry today. With all these new technologies, scien...