Infringement of a patent

Infringement of a patent occurs when an individual or company makes, uses, or sells an invention without the permission of the inventor, assignee, owner, or licensee. The U.S. courts will award damages and place penalties on the infringer. But patent infringement cases are very costly and time consuming. 

B. Formal requirements LIFETIME OF PATENTS OWNERSHIP OF PATENTS INFRINGEMENT OF A PATENT... 

Another new provision in Section 271 provides that a patented invention, if substantially completed within the United States and then finally completed elsewhere, cannot avoid infringement of the U.S. patent. This is a useful clause because a recent U.S. court decision had held that all aspects of a patented invention must be practiced within the United States in order to infringe the U.S. patent. It now remains for the courts to decide what is meant by substantially completed. ... 

Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. (Bristol) distributes cisplatin (known by the brand names of Platinol and Platinol-AQ ), which is approved for treatment of testicular, ovarian and bladder cancer. Bristol s patent listings in the Orange Book and related patent infringement suits demonstrate that doublepatenting and lengthy pendency of a patent application can generate an automatic 30-month stay on FDA approval of generic products close to their otherwise expected approval date. 

In this sense, having freedom to operate is like having a shield that defends one from charges of infringement, whereas a patent acts like a sword, allowing its holder to go on the offense by excluding others from the claimed space of his own patent. In some cases, a chemist may want freedom to operate only as he may simply wish to make, use, or sell a certain composition or process. He does not care to try to exclude... 

Before leaving this section, let s briefly appreciate that the claimed polymer by itself did not lead to infringement of the patent issued to the other party but rather it was the particular intermediate used in the manufacturing process of the polymer that infringed that patent. As a result, we saw that designing around the prior art patent was a viable option since it might be possible to make the polymer of the claimed invention if one could avoid the amino acid methyl esters of claim 17. For example, perhaps it would have been possible to polymerize the amino acid itself rather than the amino acid methyl ester of claim 17. Alternatively, perhaps a different ester... 

Any person includes corporations and/or governmental entities. Very important the any time aspect of the reexamination proceeding before the USPTO means that a party does not have to wait until she is threatened with an infringement allegation or action before she requests the reexamination of a patent. 

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