Stanford Professor Tina Seelig

“A Crash Course on Creativity” will be led by Stanford University professor Tina Seelig, April 22-June 2, 2013. During the course, teams from around the world will participate online in exercises to spark inventions and other creative results.

Delivered via Stanford’s platform Venture-Lab, this course will springboard from her book inGenius. The course is offered WITHOUT CHARGE to everyone who chooses to participate in this MOOC.

Trained as a neuroscientist and sharing with Intellectual Ventures chief Nathan Myhrvold a love of the science of cooking, Seelig directs the Stanford Technology Ventures Program where she focuses on developing the next generation of entrepreneurial leaders.

I had the pleasure of hearing Prof. Seelig speak about this last Saturday at the STARS Volunteer Leadership Assembly on the Stanford campus.

On May 30, 2012, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (“CAFC”) put further gloss on the term “common sense” as used by the Supreme Court in the 2007 case of KSR v. Teleflex.

This new case (Mintz v. Dietz & Watson) involved a patent on casings for hot dogs with a woven mesh pattern. The CAFC opinion criticized the district court for finding the patent claim to have been obvious, under the “common sense” rubric. The CAFC explained that “common sense” is a “shorthand label for knowledge so basic that it certainly lies within the skill set of an ordinary artisan.”

Gerry Elman has been listed  in the Super Lawyers 2012 magazine for Pennsylvania in the intellectual property category.

Gerry J. Elman

visit superlawyers.com

Super Lawyers is a rating service of outstanding lawyers from more than 70 practice areas who have attained a high-degree of peer recognition and professional achievement. The selection process is multi-phased and includes independent research, peer nominations and peer evaluations.

Super Lawyers magazine features the list and profiles of selected attorneys and is distributed to attorneys in the state or region and the ABA-accredited law school libraries.

For more information about Gerry, you can also view his profile on Avvo.com.

Two hearings have been scheduled by the US PTO on the effect of patents for Genetic Testing, to support the study that the PTO is mandated by the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act (“AIA”) to generate for Congress.

The first of the hearings is today.  It will be broadcast via the Web.

The second of the hearings will be March 9 in San Diego.  My colleague Prof. Chris Holman, incoming Executive Editor of Biotechnology Law Report, is scheduled to testify at that hearing.

Each of these agendas provides the logon information for the web broadcasts of the hearings.

Further information from the US Patent and Trademark Office on implementation of the America Invents Act is available here.

With hundreds of pages of documents published during in the Federal Register during the last few days, the USPTO has issued a series of proposed rules and an upcoming fee schedule to take effect next year.  See America Invents Act implementation micro website.