Always make sure you give your patent application a last minute review. ? pic.twitter.com/SqrHbJ2Yfu

— Jose Daniel (@JoseDRengifoM) May 31, 2019

Always proofread your patent application is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

November 14 roundup is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

Kal Raustiala and Chris Sprigman wrote at Freakonomics in 2012:

There’s no way OSU could patent the steak itself. The steak is just a piece of a cow. It is, in other words, a product of nature, which cannot be patented.

Wisely, OSU’s patent apparently isn’t on the steak itself, but on the knife cuts necessary to extract the steak. But that approach is dubious as well. Once you know where the steak is, the cuts necessary to get at it may be obvious to a skilled butcher. Things that are obvious cannot be patented.

The Patent and Trademark Office presumably accepted the methods for producing the cut as other than obvious. More on patented meat items from Article One Partners.

Patented meat cuts is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

Supreme Court roundup is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

• Today, Monday afternoon: Ilya Shapiro and John Paul Schnapper-Casteras preview Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission from different perspectives on eve of oral argument, Roger Pilon moderating [watch online, earlier] Why, on cakeshop case, “it won’t surprise me if the court comes up with something a little muddled and a little bit hard to read” [Chris Johnson, Washington Blade, quotes me] More: George Will (cakes are not expression; but while couple who sued cake-baker “might be feeling virtuous for having done so… siccing the government on him was nasty.”);
• “Christie v. NCAA: Anti-Commandeering or Bust” [Jonathan Wood and Shapiro, earlier here and here] “Supreme Court’s Sports Betting Case Could Redefine Relationship between Feds and States” [Shapiro]
• Federal courts were politicized before the Federalist Society came along, and promoting the cause of textualism helps de-politicize them [Roger Pilon]
• SCOTUS should use Janus v. AFSCME to recognize public employees’ First Amendment rights against forced union agency fees [Shapiro, Trevor Burrus, and Aaron Barnes] More: Shapiro and Frank Garrison, National Review; Cato Podcast with Jacob Huebert and Caleb Brown;
• Silvester v. Becerra: Ninth Circuit errs on individual gun rights, SCOTUS should correct [Shapiro and Matthew LaRosiere]
• Assuming patents = property, structure of Patent Trial and Appeal Board may flunk constitutionally required norms of judicial independence [Shapiro and Barnes on Oil States Energy Services, LLC v. Greene’s Energy Group, LLC; Federalist Society panel video with Gregory Dolin, John Duffy, Arti Ray, and Robert Greene Sterne; Jeffri Kaminski, WLF]
• Collins v. Virginia gives Court a chance to protect the integrity of the home against warrantless searches [Jay Schweikert] And mark Dec. 13 for the 2017 Cato Surveillance Conference;
• Extending Commerce Clause to prairie dogs gnaws at constitutional principle [Shapiro, Burrus, and Reilly Stephens on Cato amicus brief urging certiorari in PETPO v. U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service; Jacob Sullum]

Supreme Court roundup is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

Drug company hands patents over to Indian tribe is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

More: Scott Gottlieb on how the new, more ardently regulatory FDA keeps generic drugs (and devices) off the market. Don’t blame the patent angle; EpiPen is off-patent [Timothy Holbrook, The Conversation]

“Scott Alexander” on the EpiPen affair is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

Intellectual property roundup is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

But the attorney filing for Zhang checked a box on the application marked “accelerate” and paid a fee, usually somewhere between $2,000 and $4,000. A series of emails followed between agents at the US Patent and Trademark Office and the Broad’s patent attorneys, who argued that their claim was distinct.

A little more than a year after those human-cell papers came out, Doudna was on her way to work when she got an email telling her that Zhang, the Broad Institute, and MIT had indeed been awarded the patent on Crispr-Cas9 as a method to edit genomes. “I was quite surprised,” she says, “because we had filed our paperwork several months before he had.”

The race to patent Crispr is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

Despite today’s polarized political atmosphere, it is possible to construct an ambitious and highly promising agenda of pro-growth policy reform that can command support across the ideological spectrum. Such an agenda would focus on policies whose primary effect is to inflate the incomes and wealth of the rich, the powerful, and the well-established by shielding them from market competition. A convenient label for these policies is “regressive regulation” — regulatory barriers to entry and competition that work to redistribute income and wealth up the socioeconomic scale. This paper identifies four major examples of regressive regulation: excessive monopoly privileges granted under copyright and patent law; restrictions on high-skilled immigration; protection of incumbent service providers under occupational licensing; and artificial scarcity created by land-use regulation.

A battle plan against “regressive regulation” is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system