Blog – Adam Garson Law

Caltech

About a decade ago, there was a huge uproar over ‘patent trolls,’ also known as ‘non-practicing entities’ – companies that did not make products but that owned patents.  The business model of the patent troll was to sue or threaten infringers and to collect patent infringement damages.  The coordinated attack on the U.S. patent system […]

Chair Design Trademark

When is a chair just a chair (and not a trademark)? The Trademark Trial and Appeal Board (the “Board” or “TTAB”) recently considered this question in an opinion on whether Herman Miller, Inc. (“Herman Miller”) could claim trademark rights in a famous chair design dating back from the 1940s when Charles and Ray Eames developed a technique for molding […]

COVID Patent

Should the Covid vaccines be set free in the world, so that everyone can gain immunity?  Few would argue that’s a bad idea, since more variants may arise in under-vaccinated populations, those variants will undoubtedly spread to us, and those variants may be resistant to our vaccines. But what about the rights of the creative […]

Halloween

First your headlamp failed and then your backup light and then the light on your phone.  It’s pitch black. Not just shadowy black, but absolutely, completely black – so black that the fish have no eyes.  You’re in a limestone cave, deep underground. You’ve been utterly lost for hours.  There are no paths, only the […]

Globe

The WIPO website devotes a whole page to the “benefits of the Madrid System”. From it, you can glean four principal advantages: (1) it is equitable, that is, it is available to “small startups” or “large multinational” organizations alike; (2) it is convenient; (3) it is global in reach; and (4) it is cost effective. Let’s examine each […]

Question on a Keyboard

Dear Doc: What’s the difference between an “Intellectual Property Attorney” and a “Patent Attorney”?Signed,Thinking of Applying Dear Thinker: You may not know it, but the Doc is BOTH! Under the Patent Law (37 U.S.C. §11.5), a person who wishes to represent others before the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO)  in patent matters (a […]

artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence (‘AI’) can be pretty smart – smart enough to create new, useful and non-obvious inventions. Take, for example, Dr. Stephen Thaler’s AI tool ‘Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience’ (‘DABUS’).  DABUS created two inventions, a light beacon and a food container.  Dr. Thaler applied for patents for those inventions around the world, […]

Globe

National Filing. The first method consists of directly filing a trademark application in the foreign country. This is commonly referred to as a “National Filing.” Typically, your US attorney will retain a trademark attorney in the country where you wish to register your trademark. You provide the foreign attorney with a power of attorney and […]