Blog – Adam Garson Law

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 […]

Designs for patents

The answer is ‘yes.’ But why should we care? “Inter Partes Review” or “IPR” is a recent process by which a person infringing a patent can challenge the patent before a panel of USPTO employees.  The USPTO employees are members of the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB).  The person challenging the patent will present […]

Trademark-Application

Many small to medium size businesses go to great pains to protect their intellectual property under United States law. It makes sense given that they, typically, do not sell their goods and services beyond our national frontier. So they register trademarks and patents with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), register copyrights with […]