The Meaning of Those Strange Little Sentences – What’s in a Claim Anyhow – Claims, those strangely constructed sentences at the end of a patent or patent application, usually get all of […]
Interpreting Patent Claims
Invention Prototyping via the Internet – the TOS Agreement Landmine
Instant Prototyping Gratification – We live in remarkable times with respect to developing and bringing new inventions to market. Advances in rapid prototyping technology in the past decade have compressed the development […]
Correcting Inventorship in the USPTO
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 […]
Appeals in Patent Prosecution – Another Way to Cut the Deck
Reaching the Appeal Decision Point – As regular readers of this column know, after a patent application is filed, a series of proceedings known as prosecution (1) occurs between the Applicant (typically represented by […]
Building The Case For Patentability: Prosecution in the USPTO
The Arcane World of Prosecution – Most engineers and scientists who have had some exposure to patents know that a substantial effort is required to file a patent application in the U.S. […]
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 […]
Strategic Use of Continuation Applications
The Basic Tool – If you have filed a patent application in the United States Patent and Trademark Office, and the application is currently pending, the filing of a continuation application can […]
The Duty of Candor in Proceedings before the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office
Basic Principles – The prosecution of a patent application in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is an ex parte proceeding. This means that with few exceptions, the process of examination of […]
Staking Your (Patent) Claims
PART I Very few topics in the field of patent law are as misunderstood and mysterious as “claims,” the language at the end of a patent or patent application that appears to […]
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 […]
