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In the early 2000s, pharmaceutical companies were high on activists' hit lists, prompted by Big Pharma's ill-advised attempt to sue the South African government for patent infringement on HIV drugs; an attempt to deal with the country's epidemic by allowing cheaper, generic copies to be sold.
A proposed experiment to test a way to deliver particles into the upper atmosphere using a balloon and a one kilometre-long pipe was cancelled in 2012 after it was reported that two of the scientists involved had submitted patent applications that were similar to the techniques being proposed.
The journals that contain them are school exercise books decorated with a collage of old product labels, cocktail recipes and advertisements for patent medicines.
That worked very well as a modification – I'll have to patent it.
When Wang says mildly he wanted to do knitwear, note that what this meant on the catwalk was a patent leather coat embossed to give a trompe l'oeil cable-knit effect, a modern take on chainmail, and Gisele Bündchen closing the show in a round-shouldered sweater with a necklace of crystals knitted into its structure.
Its launch in India, one of the world's largest emerging smartphone markets, was plagued with issues around patent infringement that resulted in it being banned from selling in the country.
Xiaomi has struggled to sell its devices outside China, facing bans in the key emerging market of India due to challenges from Ericsson over patent infringement.
But the best protection for those with interesting DNA is to get a good lawyer before someone else does; it's not whether the gene should be patented, but who owns the patent.
Why should DNA be the only chemical immune from patent protection?
But Guy Burkill at Three New Square, one of the UK's leading patent barristers who specialises in telecoms-related patents, says that with worldwide sales of mobiles passing 1bn units a year, "the stakes are enormous – fractions of a penny per handset are worth fighting over".
Müller thinks it means trouble: "the total cost of patent royalties that vendors will have to cough up per unit of an Android-based device will likely become substantial and could result in a cost disadvantage for Android as compared to Windows Phone, for which Microsoft provides a patent guarantee that gives vendors peace of mind and predictable licensing costs".
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The word "patent" functions primarily as a noun , referring to a legal document granting exclusive rights to an invention. It can also be used as a verb , meaning to obtain such a patent, or as an adjective , describing something obvious. As shown in Ludwig, its usage depends on the context.
Expression frequency: Very common
