BUSINESS
March 11, 1990 | JOHN MEDEARIS, TIMES STAFF WRITER
Like any inventor, L.A. Gear feels strongly about its creations. So the thriving Marina del Rey athletic shoe company was pleased when it was awarded design patent 300,181 by the federal government last March to protect an important step forward in its business: the Brats shoe, a sneaker with a tongue so fat that the shoe always looks fashionably untied. It was a big deal for L.A. Gear, and maybe for teen-agers who once had to trip on their laces in pursuit of the untied-shoelace style.
BUSINESS
December 27, 2007 | From Bloomberg News
Google Inc., owner of the most frequently used Internet search engine, must answer a Wisconsin company's lawsuit over a browser toolbar feature that generates Web links from computer search data, a federal appeals court decided Wednesday. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit revived part of HyperPhrase Technologies' lawsuit, throwing out a lower court ruling that Google's AutoLink feature didn't infringe the company's patents.
ENTERTAINMENT
October 3, 2008 | Reed Johnson, Times Staff Writer
It's too bad that Greg Kinnear couldn't have played Robert Kearns more often in real life. That thought went through my mind last week while watching Kinnear's performance in "Flash of Genius," a new drama based on the story of the cantankerous Detroit engineer who successfully sued Ford and Chrysler for a combined $30 million for infringing on his patent designs for the intermittent windshield wiper. Kinnear apparently never met Kearns, who died of cancer at age 77 in 2005.
BUSINESS
February 24, 2009 | Carol J. Williams
When does a great idea become a patentable invention? That was a question easier to answer when Thomas Edison came up with the lightbulb and Whitcomb Judson devised the zipper -- Industrial Age innovations that clearly fit with old ideas of what it meant to invent something. But a recent case before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit points up the difficulty of making such judgments in the age of the Internet. Bernard Bilski and Rand Warsaw of WeatherWise USA Inc.
BUSINESS
September 8, 2007 | Jim Puzzanghera, Times Staff Writer
The House on Friday passed the most significant change to the patent system in 50 years, a sweeping update to the complex process for granting exclusive rights to inventors. Supporters said the legislation, approved 220 to 175, would weed out questionable patents and deter lawsuits that hindered U.S. innovation. Under the bill, experts in a specific field would be allowed for the first time to submit their views about pending patents before they were granted.
BUSINESS
December 8, 2006 | From Bloomberg News
El Segundo-based Mattel Inc.'s Fisher-Price unit won $1.32 million in damages from the Safety 1st unit of Canadian Dorel Industries Inc., bringing to $2.32 million its court awards for infringement of patents on baby bassinets and bouncers. A jury in federal court in Wilmington, Del., added the damages to a $1-million award levied by another panel in 2003. The jury said Safety 1st's infringement was intentional, giving U.S.
CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
March 2, 2007 | Tracy Weber and Charles Ornstein, Times Staff Writers
It was to be the final medical procedure for Ruben Navarro, an altruistic end to the life of a critically ill 26-year-old who doctors said had no chance to recover. Staffers at Sierra Vista Regional Medical Center in San Luis Obispo were to disconnect him from the machine pumping oxygen into his lungs. After his heart stopped, transplant surgeons were to remove his organs so they could be used to save the lives of others. But in the late night quiet of an operating room Feb.
BUSINESS
May 4, 1992 | From Associated Press
The nation's two biggest diaper makers have settled the latest in a series of court battles, an antitrust case that was set for trial today. The companies and their attorneys declined to discuss details of the settlement that was reached Saturday. Kimberly-Clark Corp. had claimed that rival Procter & Gamble Co. brought patent infringement suits against it solely to gain a monopoly of the $4-billion disposable diaper market.
NEWS
February 14, 1996 | PAUL JACOBS, TIMES STAFF WRITER
About an hour after the UCLA professor taped a plastic bandage--laced with a powerful drug--to the arm of his research assistant, the man became sick to his stomach. And in that brief, bilious moment, a popular anti-smoking remedy--the nicotine patch--was born. Another pair of scientists spent decades at UC Davis creating varieties of strawberries--checking them for taste, size and productivity--and patenting new breeds that today account for more than half of the world's production.
BUSINESS
December 4, 1988 | BARRY STAVRO, Times Staff Writer
The phone call that changed Thomas Glaze's life came from his attorney in September, 1986. Monoclonal Antibodies, Glaze's biotechnology company in Mountain View, Calif., had unexpectedly lost a patent case at the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington. A rival biotech company, Hybritech, sued Monoclonal Antibodies for infringing a Hybritech patent by selling biotechnology-produced diagnostic kits used in pregnancy tests.