Month: September 2017

Enlarge / The administration and community building of the St. Regis Mohawk Tribe. (credit: P199 via Wikimedia)

A drug company has found a novel way to avoid challenges to some of its most prized patents: handing them off to a Native American tribe for safe-keeping.

On Friday, Allergan disclosed that it gave six patents covering its top-selling dry eye drug Restasis to the St. Regis Mohawk Tribe in Northern New York. The deal will provide the tribe with $13.75 million immediately and an annual royalty of $15 million as long as the patents are valid. The new deal was soon reported in both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. 

Allergan made the unprecedented move because it will prevent any meaningful challenge to the company's patents at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board, or PTAB. Challenging patents at the PTAB in a process called "inter partes review" (IPR) was authorized by the America Invents Act of 2011, and the IPR process has significantly changed the patent landscape since then. While invalidating a patent in district court typically costs millions of dollars, invalidating a patent via IPR can happen for the relative bargain of a few hundred thousand dollars.

Enlarge (credit: Getty / Aurich)

There's a tattoo as a design, and then there's that same tattoo after it's inked on the human body. Tattoo artists often copyright their tattoos. But does that copyright stick once the image is inked on the human body?

So far, no US court has ruled that it does, despite several lawsuits on the topic that have settled out of court or have been dropped. But barring a settlement, we might soon get our first ruling on the topic, and we have video games to thank.

Tattoo artists are suing the makers of the highly popular NBA 2K game series for the allegedly unauthorized use of their tattoos as they appear on popular players like LeBron James, Kobe Bryant, Kenyon Martin, DeAndre Jordan and others. In short, Solid Oak Sketches says that Take-Two Interactive Software is infringing its copyrighted works because the game shows the players with their real-world inked tattoos that Solid Oak Sketches has copyrighted.

Enlarge / Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao. (credit: betterDCregion)

On Tuesday, the Trump administration released a document laying out its vision for the self-driving car industry. Titled "Automated Driving Systems 2.0," it gives recommendations for car manufacturers, technology companies, and state regulators about how to handle the self-driving car revolution.

The most important sentence in the document is this one: "This Guidance is entirely voluntary, with no compliance requirement or enforcement mechanism." In other words, if Waymo, GM, or the California DMV want to throw the document in the trash unread, they're free to do so. To a large extent, the Trump administration's strategy for regulating self-driving cars is to not regulate self-driving cars.

It's not surprising to see a Republican administration pursuing a deregulatory agenda, but this actually represents a continuation of the approach taken by the Obama administration. The new document updates guidance released a year ago by the previous administration. Like the Trump team, Obama regulators worried that premature regulation could stifle innovation in self-driving technology. So the Obama-era guidance was also non-binding.

Enlarge / The fruit that produces wake-up juice. (credit: CIDSE)

This is serious: climate change could put your caffeine supply at risk. Coffee is notorious for being picky about its climate conditions, with the most popular varieties only growing at specific altitudes in the tropics. That alone makes coffee susceptible to climate change, but the plants are also fussy about their pollinators, which will also be affected by the changing climate.

A new analysis suggests that climate change on its own could cause coffee producing areas in the Americas to drop production by roughly 80 percent. But the remaining productivity might drop even further unless we ensure the crops have access to pollinators.

Coffee and climate

Only two varieties of coffee are cultivated. One is called "robusta;" as its name implies, it's more tolerant of heat and holds up better to insect pests, so it can be grown across a lot of the tropics. Unfortunately, robusta is uniformly acknowledged to not taste that great. Complicating matters further, its caffeine content is high enough to set off heart palpitations at nearly double the levels found in the other major coffee variety.