Patents abandoned

Was the Invention Abandoned The invention cannot have been abandoned. An invention may be abandoned either expressly or impHedly. For example, abandonment may occur when an inventor expressly disclaims the invention by dedicating it to the pubHc. Abandonment may also occur if a patent appHcant fails to complete the examination of a patent appHcation pending within the U.S. PTO during the time periods set for completion. The pubHcation of an article disclosing the invention may be an abandonment where the inventor does not file an appHcation for a patent within one year. 

If the patent appHcation is allowed based on an appHcant s response to the second office action, examination is ended. However, if the patent examiner advises the patent appHcant that the rejections will be maintained and the appHcant views these rejections as insurmountable, the patent appHcant may choose to abandon the patent appHcation. If the patent examiner maintains the earHer posed rejections, and the patent appHcant disagrees with the examiner, the patent appHcant may appeal the examiner s decision to the Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences, which is comprised of adininistrative judges. The appeal process involves the noticing and briefing of the appeal, and oral argument before and a subsequent decision from the Board of Appeals and Interferences (step 10). Usually the oral argument is presented to, and subsequent decision is received from, a panel of three administrative judges selected from the full complement of the Board. If the Board panel decides in the appHcant s favor (step 11), the patent appHcation will be passed to issuance (step 12). If the Board decides in the examiner s favor, the patent appHcant will have to consider whether to refile the appHcation and request another round of examination or seek court review. 

In 1875, a paper by Winkler awakened interest in the contact process, first patented in 1831. Winkler claimed that successfiil conversion of SO2 to SO could only be achieved with stoichiometric, undiluted ratios of SO2 and O2. Although erroneous, this beUef was widely accepted for more than 20 years and was employed by a number of firms. Meanwhile, other German firms expended a tremendous amount of time and money on research. This culminated in 1901 with Knietsch s lecture before the German Chemical Society (3) revealing some of the investigations carried out by the Badische Anilin-iind-Soda-Fahrik. This revealed the abandonment of Winkler s theory and further described principles necessary for successfiil appHcation of the contact process. 

Ethylene oxide (qv) was once produced by the chlorohydrin process, but this process was slowly abandoned starting in 1937 when Union Carbide Corp. developed and commercialized the silver-catalyzed air oxidation of ethylene process patented in 1931 (67). Union Carbide Corp. is stiU. the world s largest ethylene oxide producer, but most other manufacturers Hcense either the Shell or Scientific Design process. Shell has the dominant patent position in ethylene oxide catalysts, which is the result of the development of highly effective methods of silver deposition on alumina (29), and the discovery of the importance of estabUshing precise parts per million levels of the higher alkaU metal elements on the catalyst surface (68). The most recent patents describe the addition of trace amounts of rhenium and various Group (VI) elements (69). 

The Patent Activity Data Base was developed to provide better tracking and follow-up of this critical activity. The course of a patent disclosure from the time it is first disclosed until a patent is issued or it is abandoned can be a complicated process stretched over a time period of several years. Monitoring the status of the patent disclosures of a large research organization over this period of time is a formidable task. The Patent Disclosure Tracking Data Base was developed to centralize the stored information on patent disclosures in a searchable and retrievable form. This data base consists of two data files illustrated in Table I. The first is the... 

Howden An early flue-gas desulfurization process using a lime or chalk slurry in wooden grid-packed towers. The calcium sulfate/sulfite waste product was intended for use in cement manufacture, but this was never commercialized. The key to the process was the use of a large excess of calcium sulfate in suspension in the scrubbing circuit, which minimized the deposition of scale on the equipment. The process was developed by Imperial Chemical Industries and James Howden Company in the 1930s and operated for several years at power stations at Fulham, London, and Tir John, South Wales, being finally abandoned during World War II. British Patents 420,539 433,039. 

While large-scale commercialization of the 3D chip has taken considerably more hme than expected, several companies now offer such surfaces. Motorola Life Sciences abandoned the Mirzabekov gel (Chapter 3) in favor of SurModic s PhofoLink surface chemistry (www.surmodics.com), chemistry which it then brought to market as the CodeLink . Amersham Biosciences acquired CodeLink from Motorola in 2002 and obtained a license to the Southern patents in 2003 to expand the product into the clinical diagnoshc arena. 

The result of all these experiments was that the idea of a particularly beneficial macro-compact porous state of the catalyst had to be abandoned, although patents had already been filed in which this had been claimed. Instead, we returned still more convinced of its correctness, to the previous more general hypothesis of the desirability of multi-component catalysts. 

The tasks and members are described in Section 12.1. A very comprehensive project assessment checklist has been published [14] a simplified version is reproduced in Appendix A.2. It is not recommended to summarize the attractiveness of a project in a single number—and to reject project B, which totals 3.9 versus project A, which totals 3.8 points. It could just be that B had a higher-ranking in patentability, but a lower ranking in competitiveness of pricing than A Last but not least, the committee decides also about the abandonment of a project, once it becomes evident that the objectives cannot be reached. 

In 1912 the German pharmaceutical company Merck first synthesized and patented a compound called 3,4-methylenedioxymetham-phetamine, or MDMA for short. At the time, many new chemicals were synthesized in the hopes that they might be usefiil in future research. MDMA, as an amphetamine-derivative, had potential as a diet drug. However, like many other compounds, research on MDMA was soon abandoned by Merck. Many pharmaceutical companies at that time applied for and received patents on everything they synthesized, just in case the compound was ever found to be useful or in case they ever decided to do more research on the compound. Many of these chemical products, like MDMA, did not show enough promise to be investigated further, and thus research was abandoned. 

The first and easiest thing that might be done is nothing at all. The applicant may simply decide not to pursue the invention, and after 12 months, the provisional application is automatically abandoned without any affirmative action by the applicant required it s as if the patent application never existed at all.12 In this regard, it must be reemphasized that a provisional patent application is not examined for patentability by the USPTO and, accordingly, will never give birth to an issued patent.13... 

If a long time occurs between an actual reduction to practice (meaning the completion of the invention) and the filing of a patent application, then the concept of due diligence is not in play but rather the question becomes one of whether the inventor abandoned, suppressed, or concealed the invention. This possibility is covered separately by 102(c), which pertains to the abandonment of the invention and, more important, by 102(g) where, in a contest to prove who had invented the subject matter first (patent interference), a party found to have abandoned, suppressed, or concealed the invention can lose to a later-inventing party who did not commit one of those sins. More on these two sections later in this chapter. 

A quick review of some of the material presented in Chapter 2 In most cases, patent applications filed after November 29, 2000, in the United States (and the rest of the world) are pubhshed approximately 18 months after the earliest application in the chain was filed. However, if the application is no longer pending (e.g., abandoned) or subject to a secrecy order, it will not be pubhshed. Also, an applicant for patent in the United States can request that the application not be pubhshed but the applicant must certify that the application has not or will not be filed in another country that requires publication 18 months after application. 

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