Blog – Adam Garson Law

Question on a Keyboard

Consider, hypothetically, that you are in the process of a nasty divorce.  Using your company-owned laptop, you e-mail your divorce attorney about all of the times you cheated on your spouse, complete with action photos of each of your romantic soul mates and detailed descriptions of the unique talents of each one. Now your spouse’s […]

Smart Lady

December 21, 2017 Patent
Designs for patents

Last week Zeitgeist Films released a biopic of Hedy Kiesler Markey, an inventor of U.S. Patent 2,292,387.  This WWII patent envisioned that jumping between radio frequencies would avoid jamming of radio-guided torpedoes.  The U.S. Navy rejected the frequency-hopping invention at the time and did not adopt the technology until much later.  Frequency hopping is now widely […]

C in the circle is for copyrights

Keeping in the holiday spirit, here’s an IP story that will sweeten your day. Protecting recipes with the traditional tools of intellectual property is difficult. Recipes are typically not copyrightable subject matter because, as merely a list of ingredients with directions on how to combine them, a recipe does not have the modicum of creativity […]

pumpkin

It’s Halloween, which, of course, means that it’s time to preserve corpses. Consider Joseph Karwowski’s invention (U.S. patent 748,284 issued December 29, 1903*).  Joe was a Russian national (‘…a subject of the Czar of Russia’) living in New York state.  He was presumably impressed by the ability of waterglass (sodium silicate, or Na2SiO3) to preserve fresh […]

C in the circle is for copyrights

A few years ago, at the behest of some photographers, we wrote about whether uploading images to Flickr.com or Instagram was equivalent to “publication” under the Copyright Act.   We concluded that it is.  Another “photographic” issue has arisen in our practice, whether thumbnail images posted on a website or on an e-mail, could be construed as permissible “fair use” […]

Designs for patents

Each year for the last five years the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has published a massive report on the state of global intellectual property protection.  The report is, frankly, staggering in its ambition.  It provides a report card for IP protection for forty-five countries around the world, including patents, trademarks, copyrights and trade secrets. The report gives us […]

Copyright

  If you are a regular reader of our newsletter, you may recall that in 2014 we wrote about a copyright case involving Mike Tyson’s Maori-inspired facial tattoo. In that case, the tattoo artist, Victor Whitmill, sued Warner Brothers Entertainment in an attempt to stop the release of the movie, “Hangover Part II.” in which one […]