Back in November 2005, shortly after establishing our respective patent practices, we contacted the late Sue Costa, Director of the Rochester Engineering Society to inquire about writing an article on patents for the Society’s monthly publication, The Rochester Engineer. Sue was very supportive and enthusiastic. Thus our first column, “What is a Patent?” was published in the December issue of the magazine.

The next month, Sue asked us if we would write another column, and consider making it a monthly feature. We said… sure, why not. The January 2006 issue was branded “The Limited Monopoly,” which is a well-known descriptor for a patent: the right to exclude others from making, using or selling an invention for a fixed period of time, in exchange for a complete disclosure to the public of how to make and use the invention.

Ever since that first column, motivated by the encouragement and growth of our readership, we’ve continued writing The Limited Monopoly® each month, having recently authored our 100^th issue. In addition to being Patent Agents, both of us are engineers and inventors as well.  From our own experiences, along with feedback from our readers, we knew that there was a need for substantive, yet concise information on a broad range of patent-related topics directed specifically to engineers, scientists, managers, and other decision makers at technology companies, manufacturers, and academia. Given today’s stream of daily blogs and 140-character tweets that are a mile wide and an inch deep, we think that the Limited Monopoly® satisfies a long-felt need that has not been met by the instant messengers.

Thus we are pleased to present this website containing the collection of our well-known columns published since 2005. Each issue of The Limited Monopoly® is posted as a fully text searchable web page, and is also available as a downloadable pdf as it originally appeared in The Rochester Engineer. Additionally, our site has comprehensive search capability, which enables users to search for back issues by date, or by topic of interest using simple keywords.

This site is the culmination of our efforts to make our columns more accessible to our readership, both new and old. Of course, we will be adding new issues of The Limited Monopoly® on a monthly basis. We welcome your interest, and we hope that if you need detailed information on various patent-related topics, you will visit often and find TheLimitedMonopoly.com to be a valuable resource.

TheLimitedMonopoly.com