Blog – Adam Garson Law

Global Findability, which alleged in a lawsuit that Nicholas Cage’s character in the new film “Knowing”  infringed Global Findability’s patent 7,107,286.  The patent addresses storing global position and altitude information “into a single discrete all-natural number geospatial coordinate measurement representation for identification of a geospatial positional location. . .”  In the movie, Cage’s character perceives […]

On December 1, 2010, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) promulgated new guidelines governing endorsements and testimonials.  Although the guidelines — being just “guidelines” — do not have the force of law,  they do provide insight on how the FTC will interpret the law.  The guidelines cover endorsements by bloggers, consumers, experts, and organizations.  Let’s look […]

A question we hear often is, “Don’t I have to wait until my patent issues to_________?”  The blank is usually filled in with such items as “raise capital”, “license my invention”, or “disclose my invention to others.”  In each case, the answer is an emphatic “NO”.  And it’s a good thing, too, since the time […]

The PTO announced a pilot program to allow small entities with two or more patent applications to move to the front of the review line by dropping an existing patent application.   As a rule of thumb, a small entity is a business with fewer than five hundred employees.   The theory is that a small […]

A recent case before the United States District Court of Appeals demonstrates how important it is for companies to understand their software licenses when planning mergers and reorganizations.  Novelis Corporation learned the hard way when it completed an internal corporate restructuring.  Here’s what happened in Cincom Systems, Inc. v. Novelis Corp., 581 F.3d 431 (6th […]

In our July newsletter, we posed the question of whether the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) was crazy (tongue in cheek, or course).  You may recall that ASCAP was seeking public performance licensing fees for ringtones.  ASCAP demanded royalties for every transmission and sounding of a ringtone because each was a public […]

There are more changes to the patent system to report, and we are hopeful. In our September newsletter, we told you about the ‘count’ system used by the PTO to measure the productivity of patent examiners.  In the bad old days (that is, during the last few years of the last administration), examiners had incentive […]

This week Apple Computer, Inc. (Apple) released a bevy of new products including a newly designed, multi-touch mouse, monikered “Magic Mouse“.  Interestingly, Apple just recently lost a trademark dispute with Man & Machine, Inc. (Man & Machine) over the “Mighty Mouse” trademark, which happened to be the mark used for Apple’s previous mouse product introduced […]