Archive for the ‘About Us’ Category

HAPPY NEW YEAR 2012

To help you mark the coming days, I am pleased to offer a special calendar I think you’d enjoy.  Each month highlights a particular invention, and it shows the dates on which interesting United States patents were issued. If you’d like to receive one, please email me with the subject:  “2012 Patent Calendar Request” and provide your contact information in the body, or click here to register.  (We have a limited quantity.)  I’d also be delighted to learn what’s new with you.  We continue to practice in the fields of patent, trademark, copyright and Internet business law.  Don’t hesitate to contact us for further information on these.

Congress Passes “Patent Reform”—The America Invents Act

As the editor of  Elman’s Patent Reform News and chair of the Patent Legislation Committee of the Philadelphia Intellectual Property Law Association (PIPLA) for much of the past decade, I had a ringside seat this year as Congress gave a painful birth to the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act (“AIA”), which Pres. Obama signed into law on September 16th.  A few of its provisions are now in effect, many will start up on September 16, 2012, and the rest will kick in on March 16, 2013.

In the past and currently, U.S. patent law has applied (subject to a serious burden of proof) the principle that the first person to invent something is entitled to a patent on it.  But for future patent applications, from March 2013 on, this principle will be superseded by a different one: the first inventor to file a U.S. patent application will get the patent.  That switch has gotten the big play in news reports, but in my view, that’s not where the most significant changes are.  In fact, the AIA will put more responsibility on the patent office to expedite the patent examination process and then weed out improvidently granted patents by newly crafted administrative proceedings, soft-pedaling the role traditionally played by the federal court system.  And more sources of information will be added to the prior art against which a patentable invention must be found to be both novel and non-obvious.

Also continuing in debate has been the question of what kinds of inventions should be coverable by patents.  In June 2010 the Supreme Court addressed an aspect of this in the Bilski case.  Now the issue is on deck with respect to a medical diagnostic test.  Watch for the Supreme Court’s decision next year in Prometheus Labs v. Mayo Clinic. For more info, visit our website and send us your questions on patent practice.

Science Fiction Meets Legal Vision™

A year ago, I sponsored a panel discussion at the World Technology Summit of how science fiction authors such as Jules Verne, H.G. Wells and Robert Heinlein had uncannily envisioned the future.  This year I took the opportunity to celebrate Damon Knight, who in 1953 conceived the technology of gene splicing, back when Watson and Crick had just sussed out the double helix structure of DNA.  My story this year first took form in a display on the back cover of the June 2011 issue of Biotechnology Law Report, featuring an illustration by Philadelphia artist Tim Durning that transports yours truly into the world of Damon Knight’s novella Natural State, where a “house plant” is  … the plant from which you’d grow your house.

30 Years of Biotechnology Law

I followed up on this subject in the article Highlighting the Course of Biotech Law published October 1 in the 30^th Anniversary Issue of GEN Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News.  (The version on the Web links to a video podcast of my own prognostications.)  That article reminds us that January 2012 also marks the corresponding anniversary of the first issue of Biotechnology Law Report, which I founded in 1982 with publisher Mary Ann Liebert and continue to serve as Editor-in-Chief. At this time I welcome the colleagueship of Steve Zweig who joins stalwart Judith Gunn Bronson on our BLR team, while bidding a fond farewell to Prof. Bob Bohrer.

Legal Aspects of Cybersecurity

Readers of last year’s edition of this newsletter will recall that I’d had the opportunity to meet Richard Clarke at a bar association luncheon in Washington, D.C. when he spoke about his book Cyber War.  This fall I met Mark Bowden at the World Affairs Council in Philadelphia, promoting his book Worm: The First Digital World War.  I cherish my autographed copy of each.

Join Us on Social Networks

I invite you to visit our website for more information about our intellectual property and Internet business law practice. Also, I invite Facebook members to become fans of our Facebook Page by visiting it and clicking the Like button.  Twitter users can follow @TechLaw_Elman and @ElmanTechNews for my latest updates in each field.

Family Matters

In June, my grandson in Hawaii, Elijah Suraj Elman Singh, was joined by a younger brother Joshua Devan and a cousin in southern California, Jack Michael.  In October I had the pleasure of visiting grandson Jack and his adoptive parents.  We also welcome into our firm’s extended family Scott Powell’s daughter Sylvie.

Once again …. a blessing:  May happiness, health and prosperity be yours — next year and forever!

-Gerry

If you’ll be at the BIO International Convention next week, let’s get together.  Send me a note via the Contact Us window in the lefthand column of this page, or leave a voicemail at 610-328-0580.

While at BIO, you should pick up the latest copy of Biotechnology Law Report—the journal I founded in 1982 with publisher Mary Ann Liebert.  We’re up to the third issue of volume 30 … still going strong.  Get it at Exhibit Booth 4213, in the Clinical Trials section of Hall C, where you’ll also see their flagship trade paper GEN, Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News.  

My latest article in GEN urges Congress to fund a transformation of the information infrastructure for examining U.S. patent applications.  It follows up on an editorial I published in Biotechnology Law Report back in 2007, which happens to have been cited in the Wikipedia entry on latent semantic analysis.

Then be sure to flip over your June 2011 issue of BLR, because the back cover features a spectacular illustration that I commissioned from Philadelphia artist Tim Durning.  It depicts a dream where I am fancifully transported into a science fiction story written by Damon Knight in 1953 (coincidentally, the year Watson & Crick sussed out the DNA double helix).

 And while in Washington, stay tuned for the latest developments on patent law in Congress.  The U.S. House of Representatives is imminently expected to consider H.R. 1249, the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act.  Many of us had high hopes that the Bill would end the practice of diverting fees collected from users of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to other governmental use, in accordance with the expectation of the patent community in 1999 when the U.S. PTO was declared a PBO.  As chair of the Legislative Committee of the Philadelphia Intellectual Property Law Association, I recently prepared for PIPLA’s Board of Governors a resolution they recently sent to Congress, urging full funding of the PTO.

World Technology Network

During the past year, Elman Technology Law, P.C. (“ETL”) sponsored two programs of the World Technology Network.  Earlier this month, we participated in a World Technology Summit, an annual event that I first attended in London in 2001 as a founding member of the WTN.  Each Summit is a two-day conference with a variety of presentations and active workshops, culminating in a gala World Technology Awards dinner honoring individuals and companies in various categories, including technology law.  At this year’s Summit, our firm sponsored a roundtable of Science Fiction authors, including my friend and mentor Paul Levinson.  Click here for more about this illuminating program on How Sci-Fi Legends Dream the Future for Us.

In June, we sponsored the WTN’s East Coast premier of a film by another dreamer of the future.  Ray Kurzweil invented, among other things, the omni-font scanner and text-to-speech readers.   Based on his 2005 book The Singularity is Near, Kurzweil has now produced a feature-length film of that title.  Before the film screening, he spoke of his calculations showing exponential growth of technologies, that lead him to expect a “singularity” within the next few decades.  At that point, the computational power of the world’s computers would exceed that of humanity’s collective brains, and biological evolution would be superseded by development of information technology.   Watch this space for information about a biographical film about Kurzweil entitled Transcendent Man, which we expect to see again this year.

 Go West Young Man

This summer, our colleague Scott Powell moved from New York City back to the Midwest, accompanying his wife Christy to Bloomington, Indiana, as she pursues a Ph.D. in Education.  Though Scott is now even farther away geographically, he retains his affiliation with our firm and is a productive member of the growing cadre of teleworkers.  Already a patent attorney and a member of the Bar in Pennsylvania, Scott has added the Indiana Bar to his credentials.  He continues to provide a high level of service for our clients for a variety of patent, trademark and Internet business law matters, working with us as closely as he did when he was here in Media, Pennsylvania.

 And … Returning to Kansas City

Last year at this time, we introduced Jerome Smith as our newest colleague at ETL.  Alas, next month Jerome will be leaving us to take on the in-house role of Senior Intellectual Property Counsel of Adknowledge, Inc., a long-time client of Jerome’s that became an ETL client upon Jerome’s arrival.  He’s moving to Kansas City, Missouri, from whence he had come to the Philadelphia area.  The good news is that our firm will continue to serve as outside IP counsel for Adknowledge, and will provide support for Jerome and the Adknowledge team of inventors and managers.  Though we will miss having Jerome in the office, we expect our connection with him to remain strong. 

Developments in IP Law

In October, M.P. Moon and I attended the Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C. of the American Intellectual Property Law Association.  We took part in workshops on such matters as dispute resolution, the patenting of biotechnology in uncertain times, chemical patent practice, and copyright law.

Also in Washington that month, my wife Lois and I attended an American Bar Association luncheon sponsored by the Standing Committee on Law and National Security.  It featured a lecture on the subject of cyberterrorism by Richard Clarke, author of Cyber War.  Since then, in the wake of recent WikiLeaks disclosures, examples of cyber attacks have raised awareness of such threats.  Stay tuned for further developments on this front.

Join Us on Social Networks

I invite Facebook members to become fans of our Facebook Page by visiting it and clicking the Like button.  Twitter users can follow @TechLaw_Elman and @ElmanTechNews for my latest updates in each field.

Last year at this time I wrote of the passing of my mother.  This year, my family and I fulfilled my parents’ wishes to scatter their remains into the sea.  In October, we participated in a lovely ritual in San Pedro Bay, conducted on a boat of the Neptune Society. Lois and I got the chance to see my brother and sister, our nephews, who filled us in on doings with their babies and their careers in Silicon Valley, and to spend time with my daughter Floren, her husband Sodhi, and my 32-month-old grandson Elijah.

Once again …. a blessing:  May happiness health and prosperity be yours — next year and forever

-Gerry

Since 2001, Gerry Elman has been a founding member of the World Technology Network (the “WTN”). Annually since then, the WTN has produced a summit conference and awards gala, the World Technology Summit and Awards, at venues ranging from London, to San Francisco, to New York City.

This year’s World Technology Summit and Awards took place in New York City on November 30 and December 1 at the Time & Life Building at Rockefeller Center.

On December 1,  the roundtable on IMAGINED WORLDS / PLAUSIBLE FUTURES: How Sci-Fi Legends Dream for Us, featured

• Paul Levinson, Author; Former President of Science Fiction Writers of America; and Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University
• Stanley Schmidt, Author; Editor of Analog Science Fiction & Fact magazine
• David Hartwell, Three-time Winner of the Hugo Award; Administrator of the Philip K. Dick Award

It was moderated by Dr. Moira Gunn, Host of Tech Nation and BioTech Nation on National Public Radio’s 24-hour program stream.   [Click here to watch a short video clip from the event]   [Click here for a video on FORA.tv of the full roundtable, payment required]

Said Gerry Elman,

“I am delighted that WTN founder Jim Clark acted on my suggestion to include such a roundtable in this year’s Summit, and that Elman Technology Law has been afforded the opportunity to sponsor this event.  It is exciting to acknowledge that many of the technological advances we are living with were first envisioned by authors writing in the genre of science fiction.  By reading science fiction, we stretch our minds towards a vision of the future that we, as technologists, then help to engender.”

Indeed, at a previous World Technology Summit, science fiction legend Sir Arthur C. Clarke was interviewed via a satellite link from his home in Sri Lanka, fitting–in that he had first proposed satellite communications in 1945.

Gerry asserts that an unsung prophet of biotechnology is Damon Knight, who in 1953 wrote a story called Natural State in which rural agricultural biotechnologists (the “muckfeet”) are at war against city folk whose lives are based on electromechanical technology.   In the story, the muckfeet communicate via genetically engineered vines with a nervous system that provides telephony, and transport themselves via genetically engineered big birds.  They win the war with the urbanites by splicing genes into a microbe to get it to gobble up copper, thereby destroying the technological infrastructure by which the city people communicate.

Gerry notes that, at the same time that James Watson and Francis Crick were sussing out the double-helix structure of DNA, Damon Knight conceived for that story the concept of splicing genes to create a biological chimera.  Later, Stanley Cohen and Herbert Boyer were to develop a tool to realize that dream, the technique of recombinant DNA, that was patented due to the watchful eye of patent attorney Bertram Rowland (whose recent passing we sadly note), working with Niels Reimers of the Stanford University technology transfer office.  Gerry observes wryly that Damon Knight’s story was not among the “prior art” cited during the prosecution of the Cohen-Boyer patents.

Damon Knight went on to found an organization of authors then called Science Fiction Writers of America (“SWFA”) and now known as Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.  More recently, Roundtable panelist Paul Levinson served as president of SWFA.  Coincidentally many scenes of Levinson’s sci-fi novels are set in midtown Manhattan, close to the venue of the Summit conference.

Gerry observes that the war between biotechnologists and information technologists envisioned by Damon Knight in Natural State has an eerily familiar echo in the present debate over “patent reform.” Many major information technology companies have been lobbying Congress to defang U.S. patent law, while most biotechnology companies are striving to resist such a statutory change.  For further information on this, subscribe to Elman’s Patent Reform News by sending Gerry  an email addressed to info@elman.com, and visit the website of American Innovators for Patent Reform.

As to the vulnerability of our technological infrastructure highlighted by Knight’s story, Gerry urges us also to heed the cautionary message in Richard Clarke’s recent book Cyber War.

A panel presentation on Enhance Your Business with Links and Friends: “Online Social Media and You” sponsored by the German-American Chamber of Commerce – Philadelphia will be at The Hub in the Cira Center across the street from the 30th Street Amtrak Station in Philadelphia.

Date: Tuesday, April 27, 2010
Time: 5:00 to 7:30 PM

Our Gerry Elman will join Kayte Connelly (President of Best Principled Solutions, LLC) and Kelly Phillips Erb (The Erb Law Firm P.C.) on a panel moderated by Vivian Isaak (Magnum Group, Inc.).

Some of the topics to be covered:

LinkedIn

• Keys to creating a business presence on LinkedIn
• How to craft an effective social network
• Why is LinkedIn working for others and what are they accomplishing?
• How do I create meaningful conversations online?
• How do I target key individuals without scaring them? Or worse, spamming?

Blogging

• Where content is king: making a blog that isn’t just blah.
• Paid platforms versus free: how much should it take to get started?
• Finding your target audience
• Making your pitch
• Building your readership
• Turning readers into clients

Twitter

• Tweets and Hoots – instant gratification from teensy messages
• Why Twitter works for business
• Promoting yourself in 140 characters or less
• The power of the “retweet” – spreading your message

And More

How about a Facebook Page for your business?  Your customers will soon become Fans.
Not only for news junkies: online networking via Wall Street Journal, New York Times & Huffington Post.
What’s next? Are Ning, Digg and Google Buzz for you?
Smartphones with GPS: Going local on the World Wide Web.