28st January, 2010

Sony sues cable channel over Michael Jackson works

Sony Music Entertainment charged TV Guide channel in a lawsuit claiming that TV Guide channel aired Michael Jackson tributes, following his death last year, featured Jackson's works without authorization.

According to the copyright infringement lawsuit filed in Manhattan federal court, Sony alleges that the cable entertainment channel did not seek authorization from or compensate Sony, which holds the copyright for some of the content featured in the documentaries. The shows were aired repeatedly in the days following Jackson's death.

The lawsuit demanded that TV Guide should stop its broadcast of the documentaries and pay unspecified damages to Sony Music Entertainment, which is owned by Sony Corp.

TV Guide channel aired a one-hour television show depicting the entirety of nine valuable music videos of the great Michael Jackson.

Microsoft and Funai sign patent deal

Microsoft has made an agreement with LCD TV maker Funai to exchange patents or rather innovations. Funai makes TVs which are sold in the U.S. under the brands Philips, Magnavox, Sylvania, and Emerson.

According to the agreement, Funai will get the right to use to Microsoft's exFAT (extended FAT) file system, an improved version of the company's older FAT (file allocation table), which is used to store and organize data on a disk. This system supports higher-capacity drives and devices and can swiftly save files onto SD cards, USB drives, and other portable gadgets, which would be perfect for managing enormous amount of audio and video on digital photo frames, cameras, phones, including TVs. The cross-licensing contract would allow Funai to use exFAT to develop new audio and video products, including LCD TVs, for which it is compensating Microsoft.

Microsoft has not declared the exact patents it might get from Funai.

Apple Granted time to win “iPad” Trademark Dispute

Apple has filed several requests in the US to claim a disputed “iPad” trademark currently claimed by Fujitsu Transaction Solutions, a Japanese company. Apple is pursuing the name “iPad” as it sounds very similar to its “iPod”.

Though Apple is already into the filing process for claiming the trademark in Europe, Canada, and Hong Kong, it still has not been able to secure the name because of the iPad - a small retail mobile device made by Fujitsu to be used by its workers and is sold in the US. The trademark is still open for dispute as Fujitsu has not been able to complete the paperwork of the original claims process that it started in 2003.

Apple made its first request to the USPTO to delay final judgment regarding the trademark in September 2009 and again in October 2009. The company again has been granted a third request, giving it time till February 28th to convince the USPTO that it has sufficient claim to the trademark to own it.

GSK and Alnylam offer Access to Patents for Neglected Diseases

London-based GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and Cambridge, Mass.-based Alnylam Pharmaceuticals Inc. are offering researchers free access to their IP, discovered compounds, technologies and know-how under a so-called "patent pool" programme. They are doing so in search of new medicines for infectious and parasitic diseases affecting the world's poorest nations - the neglected diseases.
This endeavor is being managed by a nonprofit organization, BIO Ventures for Global Health (BVGH). GSK has assured access to 800 of its granted or pending patents, while Alnylam is contributing 1,500 of its RNA interference patents. These companies have vast potential and their technology and medicines could be used for neglected diseases in the world's developing countries where R&D of new medicines has been marred by the expenditure involved.

Alnylam's RNAi technology would help validate new drug targets for the treatment of neglected diseases such as malaria, dengue fever, human African trypanosomiasis or leishmaniasis.

GSK would be providing $8 million to establish an "open lab" at its research center in Tres Cantos, Spain, dedicated to neglected diseases, where 60 independent researchers can practice their own projects as part of a drug discovery team, allowing them to use expertise, facilities, knowledge and industrial scale infrastructure of the company. Both Alnylam and GSK are looking forward on expanding the pool, with additional members of the biotech and pharma industries joining this effort.

Australian patent for DispersinB anti-biofilm technology

Kane Biotech Inc., a biotechnology company involved in developing products that prevent and diffuse microbial biofilms, has been issued patent covering DispersinB® anti-biofilm technology by IP Australia (Australian Patent and Trademark Office). Australia is the third country to issue a patent relating to DispersinB® anti-biofilm technology after the United States and New Zealand.

The patent entitled "Compositions and methods for enzymatic detachment of bacterial and fungal biofilms" claims the gene encoding DispersinB® enzyme and also the amino acid sequence of the enzyme. The claims also include a method of producing DispersinB®, its pharmaceutical composition and an antibody, its method of administration, and its applications in medical devices, wound care and oral care.

Kane Biotech and many individual researchers around the world have confirmed the efficiency of the DispersinB® antibiofilm enzyme, both in vitro and in vivo.

Google patents Map/Reduce

Google has received a patent for a system known as Map Reduce. The patent entitled "System and method for efficient large-scale data processing" covers the process of mapping work to multiple processors and then reducing the intermediate results from these processors to a final result.

The technique is used widely by data mining companies, like in Yahoo's search infrastructure, Amazon's Elastic MapReduce service and IBM's M2 platform. The Apache Hadoop is the most prominent open source implementation of the technique. The concept of mapping and reducing functions has been a basic idea behind distributed parallel processing.

New Intellectual Property Patent for Advaxis

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has issued patent for the compositions and methods for enhancing the immunogenicity of antigens for research conducted by Dr. Yvonne Paterson et al, and assigned to the Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania and licensed to Advaxis, Inc., based in North Brunswick, New Jersey.

Research, originating in the laboratory of Dr. Yvonne Paterson and continued at Advaxis has shown that the unique protein prototype called PEST (Proline, Glutamic Acid , Serine, Threonine) is related to the curative efficiency in live Listeria monocytogenes (Lm) vaccines that are engineered to secrete antigen-adjuvant fusion proteins when either LLO (listeriolysin O) or ActA are used as the adjuvant.

Advaxis is developing attenuated live Lm vaccines based on technology developed by Dr. Yvonne Paterson, professor of microbiology at the University of Pennsylvania. These vaccines would deliver engineered tumor antigens, which stimulate multiple instantaneous immunological mechanisms to fight cancer. The Lm strain is being tested for human papilloma virus (HPV)-induced disease, including cancer of the cervix.