Patent and Trademark News:
The American Innovation and Choice Online Act was introduced in mid-October by Senators John Kennedy (R-LA), Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Chuck Grassley (R-IA). On January 20, the Senate Committee on the Judiciary voted 16-6 to advance the bill out of committee and toward a vote on the Senate Floor. If passed this bill would grant State and Federal officials new means to bring antitrust enforcement actions against major online platforms that are alleged to be engaging in discriminatory conduct by preferencing their own products and services over competing products and services that are also available on those platforms. A full article was written about this over at IPwatchdog
This Month in History:
1884 Chrome tanning process for leather patented by Augustus Schultz
1816 Sophie Germain is the first woman to win a prize from the Paris Academy of Sciences for her paper on elasticity
1907 3-element vacuum tube patented by Dr Lee De Forest
1799 1st US patent for a seeding machine, Eliakim Spooner, Vermont
1926 Physicist Erwin Schrödinger publishes his theory of wave mechanics and presents what becomes known as the Schrödinger equation in quantum mechanics
1838 Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail demonstrate their telegraph machine in New Jersey