Your Government And Courts At Work.
A few things for your consideration:
1. The White House's proposed budget includes the authority for the USPTO to charge a surcharge on patent applications. The proposed budget would provide $2.7 billion for fiscal 2012 with one of the stated objectives to reduce the backlog of 720,000+ applications.
2. By Executive Order 13565 of February 8, 2011, the White House established two I.P. committees. One is the Senior Intellectual Property Enforcement Advisory Committee, which will facilitate the formation and implementation of each Joint Strategic Plan, which will be be developed by the other committee established, the Intellectual Property Enforcement Advisory Committee. As is evidenced by their names (i.e. Senior and not Senior) the Senior Advisory Committee will be comprised of cabinet level members or their designees and the Enforcement Advisory Committee will be comprised of representatives from the USPTO, DOJ, 
Department of Commerce and others.
3. Health and Human Services through its Office for Civil Rights has assessed its first ever civil penalty for violation of HIPAA. The penalty was $4.3 million against Cignet Health of Prince George’s County, Md. Cignet failed or refused to provide health records to at least 41 patients and then apparently stonewalled the patients and requests from the Office for Civil Rights to the extent that the Office for Civil Rights obtained a default judgment against them. Cignet also apparently was uncooperative in the investigation into this affair. The penalty was $1.3 million for failure to provide access to the records and $3.0 million for being uncooperative.
4. Microsoft was successful in getting a patent infringement suit originally filed in the Eastern District of Texas transferred to the Western District of Washington on the grounds of forum non conveniens. For some strange reason, there are a lot of patent infringement suits and class actions filed in the Eastern District of Texas. The 
plaintiff here, Allvoice, was an U.K. company with an office in the Eastern District of Texas but with no employees there or anywhere in the U.S. Calls there were transferred to their office in the U..K. Allvoice was incorporated in Texas but had done so 16 days before the suit was filed. Forum shop much? The Circuit Court of Appeals issued a writ of mandamus compelling transfer to Microsoft's home court even though Microsoft had also petitioned to move the case the Southern District of Texas.
