News reports that Michelle Lee will keep her job as Patent and Trademark Office director in the Trump administration are welcome, said Computer & Communications Industry Association Thursday in a statement. "This is a wise decision, bringing continuity to critical issues at a critical time. It supports the patent office’s ongoing efforts to improve patent quality under Lee’s leadership," said CCIA President Ed Black. The group's patent counsel, Matt Levy, said Lee's initiatives to enhance patent quality should be continued under her leadership. "There is still much work remaining to streamline and enhance the process of reviewing patent applications, and I think that Director Lee has shown that she is someone who can move that work forward," he said. Politico had reported that Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., told a tech industry gathering about the reappointment of Lee, who met with commerce secretary-nominee Wilbur Ross earlier in the week (see 1701180069). The Trump transition team didn't comment.

The DOJ and FTC issued a final version of their update of joint guidelines for enforcing antitrust policy on IP licensing Friday. The agencies’ original proposal got a mixed reaction in September, with several tech sector groups criticizing them for not addressing controversial IP issues like patent assertion entities and standard-essential patents (see 1609280063). The update's final version retains much of the original proposal, including the agencies’ high-level approach to enforcing antitrust policy on IP licensing matters and avoidance of the controversial IP issues. The updated guidelines reflect “intervening changes in statutory and case law, as well as relevant enforcement and policy work, including the agencies’ 2010 Horizontal Merger Guidelines,” said DOJ Antitrust Division head Renata Hesse in a blog post. The update was aimed at reflecting recent IP-related court cases, the 2016 Defend Trade Secrets Act and changes in the lengths of copyright and patent terms (see 1608120045 and 1608180056). The revised guidelines reaffirm the FTC’s “commitment to an economically grounded approach to antitrust analysis of IP licensing,” said outgoing Chairwoman Edith Ramirez in a news release. Commissioners voted 3-0 in favor of the final guidelines. The revised guidelines “are a welcome guidepost,” said Commissioner Maureen Ohlhausen in a statement. The update embraces “principles of commendable flexibility,” including that IP licensing is generally pro-competitive, she said. Ramirez is leaving the FTC next month, she announced separately Friday (see 1701130030).

The librarian of Congress is seeking comments on the role of the next register of copyrights to head the Copyright Office, said Wilkinson Barker broadcast attorney David Oxenford in a blog post Tuesday. The Copyright Office's administration of copyright laws has a “transformative” effect on broadcasters, and copyright is expected to be a big issue during the next Congress, Oxenford said. Broadcasters who want to influence how that position is handled should weigh in, Oxenford said. Comments are due Jan. 31.

A team of five Fujifilm engineers in Tokyo has been in “intensive studies” for years on ways to make LCD TV screens brighter and with better color reproduction, while using less power. The work centers on Panasonic TV sets that the team “disassembled” and then rebuilt with modified backlights and additional light-reflecting and light-processing film sheets. The work is described is a series of Fujifilm patent applications filed between December 2013 and June 2016, and summarized in a document published Dec. 1 at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office as US 2016/0349573. The published application runs 74 pages of dense text and technical drawings, complete with chemical and optical detail, and describes many practical experiments the Fujifilm engineering team undertook for several years. But the basic idea for enhancing “front brightness” and “color reproduction range” can be summed up quite simply. A modified backlight is used that emits blue light with wavelengths ranging between 380 and 480 nanometers, the document says. The light is projected onto an optical conversion sheet with quantum dot fluorescent particles, which converts the blue into component light with longer wavelengths, such as green (around 535 nanometers) and red light (around 630), it says. The effect is enhanced by a sandwich of several liquid crystal polarizing sheets that variously reflect and concentrate light in broad bands of 470-510 nanometers (blue-green), 560-610 nanometers (yellow-orange) and 660-780 nanometers (reddish), it says. One of the Panasonic TVs that Fujifilm used for the experiments was a commercially available LCD model TH-L42D2, its factory backlight replaced with an RGB narrow-band backlight that included a 465-nanometer-wavelength blue LED from Nichia, it says. The quantum-dot optical conversion sheet was laminated with the reflective sheets and placed in the front portion of the light source, it says. For some experiments, a reflective sheet also was placed at the rear of the light source, it says. The studies found it was possible to boost the front brightness of some of the modified panels by upwards of 27 percent, it says.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit should delay issuing a mandate until after filing of a writ of certiorari with the Supreme Court and, if that petition is granted, final disposition, Broadband iTV said in motion (in Pacer) to stay issuance filed Tuesday. BBiTV said appellees Hawaiian Telecom, Oceanic Time Warner Cable and Time Warner Cable didn't consent. It said its petition "presents the ideal vessel for Supreme Court review" of the presumption of validity and clear and convincing evidence standard for patents. It also pointed to 2016 Supreme Court decisions that had dissenting opinions -- Intellectual Ventures v. Symantec and Amdocs v. Openet Telecom -- as evidence the court is likely to take up a case like BBiTV's since it presents issues "which can resolve and simplify the confusion currently surrounding patent eligibility." The appellate court in September upheld a U.S. District Court ruling against BBiTV (see 1609280016). TWC is now owned by Charter Communications. Counsel for the appellees didn't comment Wednesday.

The Software and Information Industry Association praised the Supreme Court's Tuesday ruling that reversed the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit's decision on damages Samsung is obligated to pay Apple for infringement of Apple's design patents. The Supreme Court remanded the case to the Federal Circuit, which may result in a further reduction of the damages Samsung must pay in the 2012 case, which stood at $548 million (see 1612060061). The top court “took an important first step in correcting the perverse incentives that could have led to a worsening of the patent troll problem,” said SIIA Senior Vice President-Public Policy Mark MacCarthy in a Wednesday news release. It will be critical for the Federal Circuit to “develop a test for identifying article of manufacture that does not create perverse incentives,” said SIIA General Counsel Chris Mohr. The Supreme Court declined to rule conclusively whether the article of manufacture for each of Apple's design patents involved in the Samsung dispute constitutes the entire smartphone or a component of the smartphone.

TiVo and Netflix signed licensing agreements that will have TiVo continue integrating the streaming video service into its set-top boxes and Netflix having access to TiVo patent portfolios and to Intellectual Ventures' over-the-top patent portfolio, the companies announced Monday. They said the deal is one of the first licenses given under TiVo's exclusive partnership with Intellectual Ventures.

Dolby Labs is spinning off its experience with metadata for Dolby Atmos object-based immersive audio into a new field of multichannel teleconferencing over ordinary mono phone lines and cellphone connections, a newly published patent application shows. The application (US 2016/0330326), published Nov. 10 at the Patent and Trademark Office, credits Francis Quiers of the U.K. as inventor of a system that dates back to a series of patent applications made since 2012. It stakes claims on the idea of steering the voices of different conference participants’ into different sound-field positions for rendering through multiple speakers or through stereo headphones. The patented trick is to analyze the room positions of different participants’ voices in a teleconference and then describe those positions using the “dual-tone multiple frequencies” (DTMF) signaling system, which is conventionally used for inaudible control and switching of ordinary phone calls. Dolby’s application suggests using DTMF tones in a frequency range of between 5 and 6.4 kHz, which is above the most important speech frequencies, so the tones can be filtered out of ordinary speech audio without compromising quality or intelligibility. Rendering different voices to different sound-field positions improves intelligibility, the application says. Dolby representatives didn’t comment on the commercial implications of the invention.

Innovators in China “powered global patent applications to a new record” in 2015, filing more than a million applications for the first time in a single year “amid rising worldwide demand for intellectual property rights that undergird economic activity,” the World Intellectual Property Organization said Wednesday in its annual report on global patent activity. In total, about 2.9 million patent applications were filed globally in 2015, a 7.8 percent increase over 2014, when the number of applications rose 4.5 percent over 2013, WIPO said. It was the sixth straight year of “rising demand for patent protection,” WIPO said. Chinese inventors filed 1.01 million patent applications in 2015, substantially more than those filed by inventors in the U.S. (526,000) and Japan (454,000), WIPO said. But Chinese inventors were “comparatively home-focused,” it said. Only 42,000 of the 1.01 million applications from inventors based in China were for patents outside Chinese borders, “while U.S.-based innovators were the most outward-looking, with 237,961 patent applications filed abroad,” WIPO said. About 1.24 million patents were granted worldwide in 2015, up 5.2 percent from 2014 and the fastest growth rate since 2012, it said. This was due mainly to an increase of patent grants in China, which issued 359,000 patents in 2015 to surpass the U.S. (298,000) as the largest patent issuing office, WIPO said.

Chinese tech and internet giant LeEco, which recently announced ambitions to break into the U.S. in a big way and plans Wednesday to reveal a “truly disruptive” content partnership (see 1610190058), filed more than 800 patents in China over the past three years, our searches found. The filings didn't show up through the records of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office but rather in the indexes of the World Intellectual Property Organization in Geneva. Many of the patent abstracts that were translated into English are brief and none too clear in meaning, so the likely novelty of the ideas described is hard to determine. But a clear pattern of corporate interest emerges from the search. Three years ago, LeEco was concentrating on developing smart TVs but more recently moved on to downloading, networking, multimedia streaming, peer-to-peer file transfer, advertising insertion and video coding, our search found. Among the patents on TV technology we noted was one on remotely waking a smart TV set from sleep mode and another on controlling a TV with a single hand gesture so “great convenience is brought to the user in the using process."