Looks like the United States and Patent Trademark office has starting to investigate Orbitec. Thanks to our devoted reef community. We broke news last year that Orbitec was damaging the aquarium industry with their far reaching patent and since then have have submitted several other patents to back up their claim. The Patent and Trademark Office has granted the recently filed Request for Reexamination of Orbitech’s U.S. Patent 7,473,008. For those of you keeping score at home a Request for Reexamniation “is a process whereby a third party or inventor can have a patent reexamined by a patent examiner to verify that the subject matter it claims is patentable. To have a patent reexamined, an interested party must submit prior art that raises a “substantial new question of patentability”.
“An Office Action issued just last week in connection with OT’s pending application 12/258,897, and a Iwasaki reference was used to reject all claims pending in that application as either anticipated or obvious.” Which means out of the 3 patents submitted we are only left with 12/466,814 pending and the original patent 7,220,018 not yet challenged by reexamination. One down, 2 to go.
[hat tip to Kengar!]
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