If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Faced with what appeared to our non-expert eyes to have been a pretty negative ruling from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) last December, our friends at Mission Abstract Data (MAD) have responded to that ruling with the submission of more materials to the USPTO. Their lawyer apparently also had a chat with the patent examiner on February 12.
Again, we won’t try to divine the precise meaning of MAD’s latest materials – we’re not patent lawyers, after all. But in the interest of putting those materials out there for everyone to take a gander at, here they are, fresh from the USPTO’s website: the documents filed by MAD in connection with its “246” and “867” patents. (Note that the “Electronic Acknowledgement Receipt” listing the submissions about the “867” patent indicates a number of materials that aren’t included in the linked document. Our link is to a compilation of all the documents that were showing up on the USPTO website relative to the “867” patent as of noon on February 20. We’ll try to circle back around to that site every now and then and may update this post if the other listed documents surface there.)
We won’t begin to speculate on the interrelationships of (a) this filing and the February 14 lawsuits initiated by MAD (through DigiMedia) or (b) those lawsuits and the February 12 conversation between MAD’s lawyer and the patent examiner or (c) any of this and the upcoming hearing in the federal District Court in Delaware relative to the possible lifting of the stay in that litigation. Obviously, there appear to be a number of moving parts at work here. We’ll try to keep track of as many as possible and report on developments that might be of interest. Check back here for updates.
