About this app
About Giga Blast
The Commerce Department has jurisdiction over the USPTO, meaning Lutnick is the boss of the USPTO Director John Squires. Squires, who became 60th director of the USPTO a year ago, has been publicly effusive in his praise of Lutnick.
More relevant to DraftKings is the fact that under his leadership, the patent office has moved to significantly limit access to the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) – the very board to which the gaming company is appealing in an effort to have the Cantor patent annulled.
Both Squires and his predecessor, Coke Morgan Stewart, made it harder for filers to get in front of the PTAB, typically citing patent ages or court rulings.
About Giga Blast
Bally’s Corporation has announced Mira Mircheva is stepping down as the group’s executive vice president and CFO “for personal reasons”.
Mircheva’s resignation will be effective from Friday, although she will remain with the company until the end of September to “ensure a seamless leadership transition”, with the search for her replacement already under way.
George Papanier has taken on Mircheva’s role as CFO on an interim basis. Papanier will continue in his current roles as Bally’s president and a member of its board of directors.
About Giga Blast
Just eight years after the state of New Jersey successfully petitioned the US Supreme Court to repeal the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, which opened the floodgates of sports betting expansion across the country, the Garden State has again petitioned the high court, this time to defend its sports betting jurisdiction against the rise of prediction markets and sports event contracts.
On Wednesday, New Jersey Attorney General Jennifer Davenport announced that her office had filed a petition for writ of certiorari following an appeals court verdict from earlier this year that went in favour of prediction markets. That 2-1 verdict from the Third Circuit Court of Appeals was handed down in April, and New Jersey had until Thursday to petition the high court.
The petition poses the question of whether the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which was enacted in 2010 in the aftermath of the Great Recession, “preempted states from regulating sports bets that occur within their jurisdictions if those bets are offered on markets registered with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission”. Prediction markets have argued that their event contracts are financial derivatives regulated by the CFTC whereas many states contend that they are simply sports bets by another name.
