Can the U.S. government challenge, reverse or appeal any court decision made by the European Patent Office? Can the U.S. government challenge, reverse or appeal any court decision made by the European Patent Office? Is there any official channel through which the U.S. government can challenge, reverse or appeal a court decision made by the EPO on behalf of a U.S. company?
Can the U.S. government challenge, reverse or appeal any court decision made by the European Patent Office? Not unless it has an interest in the patent itself (e.g. to a military device transferred to it by a defense contractor pursuant to a procurement contract), which would be exceedingly uncommon. Otherwise, it would lack standing. If a patent application were filed by the U.S. government, of course, possibly with co-applicants, it would have the rights of any other party. Is there any official channel through which the U.S. government can challenge, reverse or appeal a court decision made by the EPO on behalf of a U.S. company? The U.S. government could request that the European officials take a different approach through diplomatic channels, which isn't really a &quot;challenge&quot; and certainly isn't a &quot;reversal&quot; or &quot;appeal.&quot; It is more akin to what a lobbyist for a private corporation could do. In some contexts, the U.S. government could probably file an amicus brief or the equivalent.
Can the subject actually sue me in England, or is it possible to sue only in the EU country I posted the article from, or in the US where the article is actually hosted? Yes. If the online encyclopedia is available in the UK, then you have libelled them in the UK and, indeed, in every country where it is available. They can choose to sue in and under the laws of any country where they were libelled. If the subject can and does sue in England, what happens exactly? This is laid out in the Civil Procedure Rules Am I correct in presuming that I will be notified of this by mail and asked to enter a defence? You will definitely need to be served with the Particulars of Claim, however, this may come by other methods than snail mail. If so, what happens if I ignore the matter? Will a default judgment against me necessarily be entered, or will the court duly consider the plaintiff's case, perform the bare minimum investigation/reasoning necessary to determine which arguments of theirs are (un)sound, and so possibly rule in my favour? A default judgement will be entered providing the Particulars of Claim show a cause of action on its face. The court will not examine any evidence or enquire into the veracity of the statements made on the Particulars of Claim. In short, unless the plaintiff has ballsed something up - you lose. If I do choose to respond, can I hire an England-based lawyer to handle everything remotely, or can I be compelled to physically attend the court in England? You are generally not required to attend court in a civil matter unless you need to testify. Even then, arrangements can be made for remote testimony. If the court rules for the plaintiff and awards damages, can this judgment be enforced in the EU, or would it apply only in the UK? It can be enforced in the EU. As a courtesy or by treaty, domestic jurisdictions will enforce foreign judgements in most cases. If the court rules in my favour, would I recoup my legal fees? You will probably recoup some but not all of your legal fees, say 50-60%. Costs orders are complicated - talk to your lawyer.
The Constitution only regulates the powers of the government; it doesn't directly say what the people can and can't do. In particular, it doesn't say directly that nobody except Congress can coin money. However, it does give the government the power to make laws, which are binding on the population. So Congress possibly could make a law forbidding cryptocurrencies, or at least regulating them, under the "regulating the value thereof" clause. However, they haven't done so. In the case of the Liberty Dollar, there are some specific laws that apply. They were convicted of violating 18 USC 485, which forbids the making of physical gold or silver coins that resemble US or foreign money, and 18 USC 486, which forbids creating or passing any physical metal coins as money (as well as other conspiracy charges, aiding and abetting, etc). None of these laws apply to cryptocurrency because they are not physical metal coins. Given that Congress has been explicitly given the power to coin and regulate the value of money in the United States, how are cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Basis created, distributed, and redeemed such that they have not been found unconstitutional? The power to regulate includes the power to not regulate. As a slight tangent, what laws allow for the creation and distribution of cryptocurrencies? In a free society, "everything is permitted that is not forbidden". We don't need a law specifically allowing the creation and distribution of cryptocurrencies; it's sufficient that there is no law that forbids it.
The law you cite says that the Secretary shall furnish such committee with any return or return information specified in such request That includes specific individual returns. That it was intended to include such returns is made clear by the provisions restricting identifiable individual data to executive session. Whether this ought to be the law might well be debated. Whether the House ought to use this law as a way to get at Trump's returns could also be debated. Those are matters of politics, or perhaps ethics, not law. Whether some other provision of law overrides this provision in this case is pretty clearly going to be argued in court, and we will see what the decision is. I won't try to predict it here.
Yes. Contracts do not excuse a site from obeying the law, and the law requires sites to obey court orders. "It violates my contract with a third party" is not a valid reason to disobey a court, and disobeying a court order is contempt. On the other hand, contract law (at least in the U.S. and U.K.) says that contracts that violate the law or public policy are invalid, and so you could not win a breach of contract suit if the defendant could not legally comply with the contract. Now, a contract might require the company to attempt all possible legal ways to get the court to revoke its order, or to avoid the order in the first place (for instance, if Google does no business in China, a U.S. court might not excuse them from a contract because they capitulated to the Chinese government). However, when push comes to shove, private contracts are lower priority than court orders.
In the US, it depends on why you are doing this, and how you go about performing the operation. There are approved devices and procedures, and there is the other stuff. In an emergency that is life-threatening or threatens severe debilitation, it is permitted for a physician to try an extreme measure – if the state has a "Right to Try" law. Otherwise, a review and official approval by the relevant IRB is required. The devices are regulated by the FDA, but the FDA does not regulate the practice of medicine, so the feds don't have a say in whether a procedure is allowed. Nevertheless, use of unapproved devices can be taken to be evidence of failing to meet the required standard of care, in the case of a malpractice suit or punitive action by the state regulatory board. There is no specific law prohibiting removing lots of organs and replacing them with prostheses, though arguable what happened was that the brain was removed (it's not that a replacement shell was built around the person). Ordinarily, intentionally "killing" a person is illegal (except in case of sanctioned execution or self-defense). There is zero case law that would tell us whether removing a brain from a body "kills" the person. Most likely, there would be a prosecution for unlawfully causing a death, and either the legislature would tune up the law w.r.t. the definition of "causing death", or the courts would do so.
Taking the US as an example, the Constitution states Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. Congress or a state government hasn't prohibited you from comparing platforms. Another private entity has. And, that's fine. You're free to launch the app as a separate website, or print out the flyers and hand them to people on the bus, or publish your own monthly magazine comparing various platforms, so you still have freedom of speech and of the press. As an example, if you write a letter about how great the government of North Korea is to the letters department at Stamp Collectors Magazine, and they don't publish it, have they violated your human rights? The app store restriction may be quite dumb. After all, the built-in web browser allows the reading of the exact same news. But there's no law against being dumb.
The constitutional basis for all US patents is Article I, Section 8, Clause 8, of the US Constitution, which grants Congress the power: To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries. See &quot;Intellectual Property Clause&quot; from Cornell's WEX Legal Information Institute. US Patent law requires an applicant to include with a patent application &quot;disclosures&quot;. As the page &quot;Patent Disclosure: Everything You Need to Know&quot; from UpCounsel states: [A] patent disclosure is a public claim of data about an invention. In general, it is any part of the patenting process in which data regarding an invention is disclosed. A good disclosure tells someone else how to create the product. [Emphasis added] The U.S. Constitution gives Congress the right to offer exclusive rights to people for their inventions for set periods of time. This is only if and when the inventor agrees to adequately disclose the invention in writing. [Emphasis added] A formal patent disclosure ... stipulates a set of claims regarding the invention, as well as other data that reveals the unique nature of the product. It should be expressed in writing with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) as part of the patent application. What Is Included in a Patent Disclosure? The Specification. A primary disclosure or &quot;specification&quot; is a main document in a patent application. It describes the ways in which the invention is innovative compared to similar inventions and explains the scope of monopoly the applicant believes he or she has to the invention. The specification describes the item and the way to make and to use it, in clear and exact terms. Someone in the field must be able to reasonably create it with these instructions. Further, the specification notes the patent application filing date on which inventor can the rely. It also offers evidence that the invention belongs to the person in question. The Enablement. This explains how to create the object and how someone in the field can do so. The instructions cannot be vague or unclear, but must be exact and detailed. When the patent expires, the enablement should still be usable. This section should include any figures or drawings, with explanations. Again, you will want to show how your invention is special. So, you might want to include many details and different variations of the invention. Later, many of these variations may be deleted from the document as unnecessary. This section may be numerous pages long. Best Mode Requirement. The path revealed must be the best way of creating the item within the author's awareness at the time of filing. Therefore, it may include specific or unique techniques. There should be no concealment. A poor-quality disclosure can risk the appearance of concealment. [Italics added] Claims. This area tells the reader the exclusive rights the patent offers to the inventor.... The official page &quot;Duty of Disclosure, Candor, and Good Faith&quot; from the USPTO cites 37 CFR 1.56 on the duty to disclose information material to patentability. This regulation provides, in the relevant part: A patent by its very nature is affected with a public interest. The public interest is best served, and the most effective patent examination occurs when, at the time an application is being examined, the Office is aware of and evaluates the teachings of all information material to patentability. Each individual associated with the filing and prosecution of a patent application has a duty of candor and good faith in dealing with the Office, which includes a duty to disclose to the Office all information known to that individual to be material to patentability as defined in this section. The duty to disclose information exists with respect to each pending claim ... These disclosures include the state of prior art, as kown to the applicant and the applicant's associates. The page &quot;BEST MODE: Noncompliance with the Duty of Disclosure is Not an Option&quot; states: When you apply for a patent in the United States, you have a legal duty to disclose prior art that could be used to reject your application — in essence, information that may be used against you by the examiner of your application. While persons accused of a crime have a right to remain silent, so as to avoid self-incrimination, inventors applying for a patent have no such right. To the contrary, an inventor’s failure to comply with the duty of disclosure risks any resulting patent being unenforceable. The page &quot;THE PATENT BARGAIN AND THE CURSE OF RETROACTIVITY&quot; states: One of the requirements for the USPTO to issue a patent is that the applicant’s claimed invention be fully disclosed in the application and published in the patent. This is sometimes referred to as the “patent bargain.” This is at the opposite end of the spectrum from trade secrets law, under which a company can sue for © misappropriation of a trade secret but only if it takes reasonable measures to maintain confidentiality of the trade secret. ... Under patent law an inventor must fully disclose his or her invention before enforceable patent rights come into being. This disclosure requirement is sometimes termed the “patent bargain,” under which an inventor gains the right to exclude others from practicing a patented invention in exchange for disclosing the invention so that it may be known by the public and indeed practiced after the patent term has expired. ... [Emphasis added] In general a patent application is not just a description of a specific industrial process. It includes the research by which that process was discovered or developed. That research can benefit others in the same field, and so &quot;promote the progress of science and the useful arts&quot; in helping others to do further research and make further discoveries, which can often be done without infringing the patent itself. Of course, once patent protection expires, anyone may use the patent, and the final patent documents are supposed to include sufficient information that &quot;one skilled in the art&quot; will be able to build the invention or use the process that had been patented. This is in contrast to the situation which would exist had the inventor retained the discovery as a trade secret. In that case no one would have been able to use the patented discovery until some other person independently discovered and disclosed it.