Oops, You’ve Got The Wrong Guy… Errors Can and Do Happen – While the preparation and prosecution of patent applications is about striving for perfection, sometimes errors happen. Determining who should be […]
Correcting Inventorship in the USPTO
Patents Rights – Avoiding a Collision with the Social Media Iceberg
Social Media and Intellectual Property – The Iceberg and More – As our world becomes ever more connected, and opinions, ideas, and thoughts are exchanged freely through the rapidly increasing use of […]
Patentability and the “Long-Felt Unmet Need” – The Christmas Tree Stand as a Case Study
The Law, Statistics, and Anecdotes – One of the key laws for patentability of an invention is that the invention must be unobvious1. In making a determination with respect to obviousness, certain […]
Inventorship: Who Thunk Of It?
The Law – The United States is unique in the industrialized world in that an inventor must be named as the applicant for a patent, rather than his employer. Federal statute 35 […]
The NDA – A Key Agreement in Business Operations
A Healthy Paranoia – Protection of intellectual property can be a critical task for an enterprise. This is often the case from the earliest gestation of a business when a new invention […]
A Hypothetical Case – of Keeping an Invention From Going to the Dogs
The Opportunity (1) – Dave is the founder of Catalyst Concepts, a small product design firm. He’s been looking for years to get some business from Gigatron Inc., a major player in […]
Have Brain, Will Invent: Who Owns Your Inventions?
The Law – Our U.S. Constitution provides that inventors shall have “the exclusive right to their discoveries.” Accordingly, Federal statute 35 USC 111 states that, “An application for patent shall be made, […]
The Provisional Application for Patent – What It Is, When It’s Used
On June 8, 1995, the United States Patent and Trademark Office introduced the “provisional application for patent” to inventors. The premise was to encourage small businesses and independent inventors to protect their […]
The Invention Disclosure- Putting a Stake in the Ground
A Good Habit to Get Into – In the United States, a limited monopoly in the form of a patent may be granted to the first to invent, rather than the first […]
…And Last But Not Least – The New “First to File” Statute Under the AIA
Encore – For slightly over a year now, the majority of our columns have covered various provisions of the America Invents Act, which became law on September 16, 2011. And for good […]
