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 […]
If you are tired of special .TIFF readers and downloading one page at a time from the PTO patent search website, you have two other free choices: Google Patent Search and Freepatentsonline. Google Patent Search is a great resource to quickly screen an invention against issued U.S. patents and published applications using familiar Google searching. […]
On September 17, 2009, Adam Garson made a presentation on copyright and trademark law to the National Organization of Professional Organizers (NAPO). If your group would like Adam or other lawyers at Lipton, Weinberger & Husick to present topics on intellectual property law, let us know. We’d be pleased to help.
Patents are personal property, just like your car. Can your creditors foreclose on your patent? If you use your patent as collateral for a loan or create any other security interest in the patent and then default on the underlying obligation, the person holding the security interest in the patent can foreclose on the patent […]
Confused over when to use the appropriate symbol when referring to trademarks and copyrights? Here’s the scoop. The “C” in the circle is notice to the world that the associated work is protected by copyright law. Although not required by the Copyright Act, it may be placed on any published work. Registration of the copyright […]
David Kappos, the newly-sworn Director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (‘PTO’), is moving quickly to place his mark upon the agency. In one of his first acts, Director Kappos launched an internal PTO task force to change fundamentally the way that patent examiners review patent applications. At present, the PTO measures the productivity […]