Tag: Surprising
Saint Inu: The Cryptocurrency that Keeps on Giving
Earlier this month, The Water Project organization received a $30,000 gift to construct a fresh water well at the Lutali Primary School in Kenya. In the United States, nearly half a million meals were provided to children in need because of a contribution made to the group No Kid Hungry. A children's hospital site in Cambodia was funded entirely by a $50,000 cryptocurrency donation to the healthcare crowdfunding organization Watsi, Inc.
Saint Inu: The Cryptocurrency that Keeps on Giving
All of this was made possible by a rather surprising donor.
The benefactor of these donations is a cryptocurrency project called Saint Inu that was created less than a month ago. In just that short period of time, the project has already donated upwards of $300,000 worth of cryptocurrency to charities and non-profits around the world through their Charity Platform.
The newly formed Saint Inu project has started to turn heads in both the Charity and Cryptocurrency space with their jaw dropping generosity. The team has a token that gives a percentage of each transaction towards donations to charities and the token holders, however, the team says that this is "simply just the beginning".
The Saint Inu Development Team is working to reimagine how we envision donating to charity. The project is developing and launching a first of its kind "Play to Donate" (P2D) gaming platform called the SIGMA Platform (Saint Inu Gaming and Metaverse Arcade Platform). This launchpad will allow its users to earn cryptocurrency on behalf of their favorite charities by simply playing the games on the platform.
The "Play to Earn" (P2E) model has already proven to be successful in the crypto industry with P2E games such as Axie Infinity and Decentraland garnering multi-billion-dollar evaluations. The Saint Inu team believes that the next major trend in the market will be P2D games that allow users to donate to causes simply by playing a game. According to the Lite Paper published last week, there will also be P2E games on the SIGMA Platform.
With several games scheduled to be released next year, the team is excited about the future of the SIGMA Platform. They believe the revenue generated from the upcoming games will allow them to regularly make 6-figure donations and disrupt the charity, cryptocurrency, and gaming industries.
In a space that can be so unforgiving, it's a nice change of pace to see a project that is doing so much good for others.
For more information, please visit the Saint Inu Website, Twitter, or Telegram.
https://saintinu.com/
www.twitter.com/saint_inu
How Effective is Australia’s 12 Month Acceptance Deadline in Limiting Examination Delays?
One of the objectives of the Raising the Bar IP law reforms – most of which commenced on 15 April 2013 – was to reduce delays in the resolution of patent (and trade mark) applications. The perceived problem with such delays was not that applicants were unhappy with the speed of processing of their applications (in fact, most choose to defer examination and acceptance of their patent applications), but rather that delays create uncertainty about whether a patent will be granted, and what scope the granted claims might have. As noted in the Explanatory Memorandum to the Raising the Bar Bill, ‘[d]elay may suit the party, but it is not in the interests of the public, or the party’s competitors.’
There were four main features of the reforms that were expected to reduce delays and uncertainty:
- reduction, from six months to two months, of the period within which an applicant is required to request examination, once directed to do so by the patent office;
- reduction of the maximum period available for an applicant to obtain acceptance of a patent application, following issue of an initial examination report, from 21 months down to 12 months;
- ‘tightening’ of the rules around when divisional applications can be validly filed, to reduce opportunities for what the Explanatory Memorandum describes as ‘abusive uses’; and
- refinement of opposition proceedings, mostly in the form of more stringent criteria for obtaining extensions of time.
The reforms to opposition proceedings had an almost immediate impact, since they applied to all new oppositions filed on or after 15 April 2013, as well as (to a more limited degree) oppositions that were already in progress. However, since over 99.5% of all accepted applications are not opposed, the reduction in opposition duration is irrelevant to the overwhelming majority of cases.
It has taken longer to reach the point at which there is sufficient data to evaluate the effect of the change to the examination period, since this only applied to applications for which a request for examination was filed on or after 15 April 2013. Many of these applications remained in the system for years. Indeed, the last patent to be granted under the pre-Raising the Bar regime – without being additionally delayed by opposition proceedings – was no. 2010311063, which was derived from a PCT application that entered the national phase in Australia on 17 May 2012. Examination was requested on 9 April 2013, and a first report issued on 7 August 2018 (after the application inadvertently lapsed and was restored). The application was eventually accepted on 17 February 2020, and the patent granted on 18 June 2020.
I have now analysed nearly two decades worth of Australian patent examination data, spanning the period before and after commencement of the Raising the Bar reforms. Further details and charts are below, but in summary I have found that:
- reduction of the maximum examination period by nine months (from 21 to 12 months) has resulted in a drop of only a little over three months in the median period between initial examination and acceptance of successful applications;
- the reforms have not, however, resulted in any lasting improvement in the pendency of the most ‘stubborn’ applications, which are only accepted following one or more divisional applications being filed for the purposes of continuing examination (for want of any better term, I call these ‘continuation divisionals’);
- as a result, the ‘top’ 2% of cases are still pending for 900 days or more between an initial examination report being issued and an application finally being accepted;
- perversely, following an initial temporary drop in the number of continuation divisionals, the reforms actually seem to have resulted in an increase in the proportion of divisional applications that are filed for the primary purpose of continuing examination;
- on the other hand, however, the major use (i.e. over 60%) of divisional applications remains their primary purpose of pursuing alternative claims following acceptance of claims in a parent application.
Overall, reducing the examination period has had a relatively minimal effect on total pendency of patent applications – a reduction in the time prior to examination, i.e. between filing and a first examination report being issued, has been much more significant. However, it appears to have had the unintended consequence of increasing the use of divisional applications to continue examination.
Read more »Sequenom Down-Under – Appeals Court Finds Non-Invasive Foetal DNA Test Patent-Eligible in Australia
In 18 June 2021, a Full bench of the Federal Court of Australia (Middleton, Nicholas, and Burley JJ) unanimously upheld a decision of a single judge of the court (Beach J), finding that a method of detecting cell-free foetal DNA (cffDNA) in maternal blood serum comprises patent-eligible subject matter (i.e. a ‘manner of manufacture’) under Australian law: Ariosa Diagnostics, Inc v Sequenom, Inc [2021] FCAFC 101. The patent at issue is Australian patent no. 727,919, covering an invention originally developed by Oxford University researchers, and subsequently transferred to Sequenom Inc. The patent expired in March 2018, however a live dispute remains because Ariosa Diagnostics licensed its ‘Harmony Test’ – which Sequenom says (and the Full Court has agreed) infringes the patent – for use in Australia since at least September 2015.
To my mind, the result in this case is neither particularly surprising nor contentious. The patent claims are directed to a method of detecting cffDNA. While the method is underpinned by the naturally occurring fact – not known until its discovery by the inventors prior to March 1997 – that cffDNA is present in maternal blood serum, a useful method of detecting a previously unknown natural phenomenon, having a practical application, has long been considered patentable. Ariosa’s arguments that Sequenom’s claims were in substance directed to the ‘mere’ discovery itself, resulted only in the production of ‘information’, and therefore unpatentable, were unsuccessful. And while the broad scope of the main claim in this case might raise other issues, such as obviousness or sufficiency of description, these matters have also been addressed at first instance and/or on appeal, and are separate from the question of subject matter eligibility.
Nonetheless, this case will generate some interest, if only because the result in Australia is opposed to the outcome of equivalent litigation between Sequenom and Ariosa involving a corresponding patent in the United States. In that case, a narrower claim than in Australia was found to be directed to an unpatentable natural phenomenon. The result was controversial, not least because a number of judges on the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) – including Judge Linn on the original panel (Ariosa Diagnostics, Inc.v. Sequenom, Inc. (Fed. Cir. 2015)) and Judges Lourie and Dyk in a decision refusing en banc rehearing – indicated that they felt bound by the Supreme Court precedents, but did not agree with the outcome. There was therefore great disappointment when the US Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal.
The outcome of the Australian appeal is not all bad news for Ariosa, however, with the finding of the primary judge on infringement being partially reversed. In particular, there were periods during which the Harmony Test was not carried out in Australia, but instead samples were sent to the US for testing by Ariosa, which the primary judge found also to be infringing actions. The Full Court has disagreed, finding that ‘importing’ the information resulting from the tests into Australia did not comprise a relevant ‘exploitation’ of the claimed method, as it might have done were the product of the method a physical article.
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