Industrial IP

If you prosecute patent applications long enough, you are bound to receive a restriction requirement. Restriction requirements have become quite common, with the overall restriction rate estimated to be a little more than 50%. Restriction requirements can create headaches for applicants by limiting the ability to amend claims during prosecution. Applicants should also beware that other strings are attached to restriction requirements. For example, in the case of a species restriction: “If claims are added after the election, applicant must indicate which of these claims are readable on the elected species or grouping of patentably indistinct species.” (MPEP 809.02(a)) That is, for the remainder of prosecution after a species has been elected, any added claims need an extra statement to indicate their species. An extra statement may seem small in the scheme of everything, but forgetting this little indication could give the Examiner an avenue to stall the application.   ...

Food processing technology is an active area for patent filings. Even the fundamental concepts of a new restaurant can be the subject of patent protection. Today we tell the story of one such patent as gleaned from publicly available documents and other on-line resources. The story of US Patent 10,528,915 (Sanadidi, et al.) issued January 7, 2020 is that of a father and son inventor team who start their own restaurant ( Bella Pita ) in the LA area (there are two locations). M. Y. Sanadidi and his son Ezedin co-invented the idea for the new Mediterranean-style restaurant, which they opened in 2007. As M. Y. explained, they wanted to do something different: “… we [] resolved to determine whether there was any innovation that we could bring to the field of Mediterranean-style restaurants that would make us stand out from the many other restaurants of this type.” It turns out M.Y. was a professor of computer science at UCLA and an inventor on several patents related to com...