Imagine that you live in an apartment in a large city, and that you don’t want to have cable television. You used to have “rabbit ears” on your television, but once the analog transmitters went off the air, you found that your apartment faces the wrong way, and now all you get on your set […]
Here’s another example of the “if value, then right” approach. You may recall that the first sale doctrine permits an owner of a copyrighted work to sell, transfer, loan, or even dispose of the work without infringing the creator’s distribution rights. So, for example, if you were to purchase a music CD or a book, […]
We’ve been following developments in copyright law related to the fashion industry for quite some time. You may recall that clothing falls into the category of a functional item, which is not protectable under United States copyright law. Yet, because fashion designs are frequently “knocked-off,” the fashion industry has long sought copyright protection for designs. […]
Thanks to the America Invents Act, you’ll have to live with it, if your competitor submits the information on time and meets other requirements. As of September 16, 2012, persons who are not the patent applicant can file papers and make arguments to the patent examiner as to why someone else’s patent application should be […]
Do you want to find out whether your better mousetrap is patentable? For inventors and patent attorneys, Google Patent Search is a cheap (as in free) and easy way to perform a light-weight screening search. Since 2006, Google Patent Search has allowed use of familiar word searching skills to search a database of U.S. patents […]
Here’s another Internet copyright conundrum. Assume you have a social networking website where you let users post links or bookmarks to their favorite videos from all over the Internet. To view the videos, a visitor clicks on a link and the video is streamed into a video frame much like you see on YouTube. Many […]
Whether an invention is the sort that can be patented is determined by §101 of the patent statute. That section states: Whoever invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof, may obtain a patent therefor, subject to the conditions and requirements of […]
From time to time, we receive inquiries from authors about registering book titles as trademarks. Sounds like a good idea but can it be done? The short answer is “no,” trademark law does not permit registration of a work’s title. But, as with many legal rules, there are exceptions. The complete title of a work […]
In April 2012, the The Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) issued its “2012 Special 301 Report” (Report) in which it reviews the state of intellectual property rights protection and enforcement in trading partners around the world. It’s an interesting document, which underscores the importance of intellectual property rights (IPR) to world economy, […]
Inventors and patent attorneys know that creating any invention has two parts: (a) identifying a problem; and (b), solving that problem. To protect the invention by patent, the invention must be ‘non-obvious.’ That is, if two or more prior art patents or other references when taken together teach all of the elements of a patent […]