Feb. 14 (Bloomberg) — Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd.
failed to persuade a U.S. judge that General Electric Co.
infringed its patent on wind turbine technology.
The U.S. District Court in Orlando, Florida ruled on Feb. 8
that Mitsubishi Heavy doesn’t get anything on its claim of
infringement and General Electric won its counterclaim for
judgment of non-infringement, according to a posting from court
clerk Sheryl Loesch. The ruling upheld a July 5 decision in
favor of General Electric that eliminated a need for a trial.
The court, in its interpretation of the claims in
Mitsubishi’s patent 7,452,185, “has too narrowly interpreted
the patent’s scope,” Mitsubishi Heavy said in a statement Feb.
12. The company has the option to appeal the ruling to the U.S.
Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, the Washington-based
court that hears appeals of patent cases.
Mitsubishi Heavy, based in Tokyo, sued Fairfield,
Connecticut-based General Electric in 2010 claiming infringement
of a patent which applies to technology to reduce the burden on
a wind turbine by controlling the pitch angle of the blades in
accordance with the blade rotation angle and other factors.
“Mitsubishi Heavy will quickly issue notification if
there’s any progress that merits disclosure,” Hideo Ikuno, a
spokesman for the company, said in a phone interview yesterday.
The case is Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd. v. General
Electric Co., 6:10-cv-00812-JA-GJK, U.S. District Court for the
Middle District of Florida (Orlando).
For more patent news, click here.
Trademark
Apple, Gradiente Electronica Must Share Brazilian IPhone Mark
Apple Inc., doesn’t have the sole right to use the iPhone
trademark in Brazil, that country’s IP regulators ruled, the BBC
reported.
Gradiente Electronica, a Brazilian company, registered the
mark in 2000, according to the BBC.
Apple had contended it was entitled to sole use of the mark
because Gradiente Electronica took 12 years from its
registration of the mark to produce a product and didn’t use the
mark between January 2008 and this month, according to the BBC.
Brazil’s Institute of Intellectual Property said that while
Apple doesn’t have the exclusive right to use the mark with
telephones, it can use it exclusively for other products, such
as clothing or software, the BBC reported.
Thailand Rice Variety Given EU Geographic Origin Protection
In what may be the first regulation of its kind, the
European Union has entered a name written in the Thai language
and alphabet for a product that originates in Thailand into the
register of protected designations of origin and protected
geographic indications.
The product is a kind of gelatinous rice known as Khao Hom
Mali Thung Kula Rong-Hai. It took the applicant five years to
persuade the European Commission to grant the protection.
According to the registry entry, the rice is grown in five
provinces in northeast Thailand. When cooked it is “velvety,
spongy and slightly sweet.”
The regulation specifies that it must be packaged within
the five-province area, which has slightly saline soil. It can
be cultivated only once a year.
The regulation was published in the Official Journal of The
European Union on Feb. 11.
For more trademark news, click here.
Copyright
Government Argues Against Review of $220,000 Downloading Damages
The Obama administration has filed a brief to the U.S.
Supreme Court in a copyright case involving unauthorized music
downloading.
The case, which began in federal court in Minnesota in
2006, is against a woman who is accused of downloading 1,702
songs without authorization from the file-sharing website Kazaa
and making them available for free to other computer users.
Three juries reached verdicts in favor of the record
companies. The judge granted a second trial after the first
because of an improper jury instruction. A third trial was set
after the record companies refused to accept the judge’s
reduction of the jury’s $1.92 million award in the second trial.
In September a federal appeals court said Jammie Thomas-
Rasset owed the record companies $222,000 in damages,
overturning a lower-court ruling that had reduced the amount.
She had been sued by labels owned by the world’s four
largest recording companies, Sony Corp.’s Sony Music
Entertainment, Access Industries Holdings Inc.’s Warner Music
Group Corp., Vivendi SA’s Universal Music Group and Citigroup
Inc.’s EMI Group.
After the appeals court ruling, Thomas-Basset asked the
Supreme Court for review.
In its Feb. 11 filing, the government argued that the
appeals court correctly increased the damages, and that a
$220,000 award is “consistent with due process” and that
further review of the case isn’t warranted.
The high court case is Jammie-Thomas Rasset v. Capitol
Records Inc. 12-715, U.S. Supreme Court (Washington). The
appeals case is Capitol Records v. Thomas-Rasset, 11-2820, U.S.
Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit (St. Louis). The lower-
court case is Capitol v. Thomas-Rasset, 06-01497, U.S. District
Court, District of Minnesota.
Africa IP Forum, Postponed Over NGO Objections, Set for Feb. 26
South Africa’s Department of Trade and Industry has
rescheduled a conference on IP issues that was postponed last
year because of strong objections from a variety of non-
governmental organizations.
The conference, organized by the U.S. Commerce Department
together with the World Intellectual Property Organization, was
originally set for April 2012 in Cape Town, South Africa. It was
put on hold after many objections were raised that it put too
much emphasis on enforcement.
Among the organizations that raised objections were
Electronic Information for Libraries; Consumers International;
the Center for Health, Human Rights and Development, Uganda; and
Knowledge Ecology International.
Global Health Watch, a coalition of public health experts,
NGOs, community groups, health workers and academics, said in a
statement that last year’s proposed conference failed to address
conflict of interest, lacked a development and public interest
intention, and lacked transparency and information.
The conference is now set for Feb. 26 and 27 in Midrand,
South Africa, which is between Pretoria and Johannesburg.
According to a statement from the Department of Trade and
Industry, the conference will now “ emphasize the successes,
challenges and strategies in the establishment of IP regimes
that encourage innovation and entrepreneurship, and improve
trade and investment, while protecting public health and
safety.”
Photographer’s Trade Group Submits ‘Orphan Works’ Proposal
American Photographic Artists, a trade group of
professional photographers, has responded to a request from the
U.S. Copyright Office to submit a proposal for legislation
dealing with so-called “orphan works.”
This term refers to works that have been abandoned,
forgotten, or are otherwise unprotected by their creators.
APA argued in its proposal that many apparently orphan
works have actually been hijacked or kidnapped, with information
about their authorship stripped away. The association asked that
Congress include in any proposed legislation dealing with orphan
works the ability of the copyright holder to recover damages and
attorney fees for “unwittingly orphaned creative work.”
The organization noted that technological advances in
recent years have enabled those in the photography community to
develop a registry that can minimize the instance of works being
treated as orphans. This registry, called the Picture Licensing
Universal System, allows for multilingual machine-readable and
human-readable rights information to accompany images
For more copyright news, click here.
Trade Secrets/Industrial Espionage
‘I Drank Halliburton Fracking Fluid,’ Colorado Governor Says
In efforts to support drilling companies’ desires to keep
from disclosing the ingredients in the fluids they use for the
hydraulic fracturing process, Colorado Governor John
Hickenlooper told a U.S. Senate committee that the fluid is so
safe that he has even drunk it, the Washington Times reported.
In testimony before the Senate Committee on Energy and
Natural Resources he said that if companies such as Houston-
based Halliburton Co. — which produced the fluid he drank –
were required to disclose all the ingredients that they consider
trade secrets, “they wouldn’t bring it into our state,” the
Washington Times reported.
The fluid was comprised entirely of ingredients from the
food industry, he told the committee, and is “a benign fluid in
every sense,” according to the newspaper.
Fracturing fluid is forced into the ground to break apart
rock structures and release oil or gas, the newspaper reported.
To contact the reporter on this story:
Victoria Slind-Flor in Oakland, California, at vslindflor@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Michael Hytha at mhytha@bloomberg.net.
