Intellectual Property

USPTO Government Shutdown

Oh, great.  Another government shutdown.  The last one lasted 35 days, ending January 25, 2019.  Before that, it was February 2018 and, before that, January 2018.  We’re about to have the government forcibly closed.  Planning on a trip to a national park?  Better reconsider.  Want to sell your product to the military? Fuhgeddaboudit. What about the […]

Ai Hierarchy

Development and public release of ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence (AI) based chatbots has cast AI into the public spotlight even though it has been a subject of modern academic research since the 1940’s. Over the years, we’ve written several articles on artificial intelligence and intellectual property law. Way back in 2017, we pondered the question of whether a work generated by AI is protected under copyright […]

Birkin Bag NFT

New technologies give rise to new intellectual property headaches. Non-fungible tokens or NFT’s are no exception. What is an NFT? For the uninitiated (and hermits), an NFT is a unique digital token that one can own, sell, or redeem. Bitcoin and Ethereum are examples of digital tokens. Cryptocurrency, however, is fungible. The Bitcoin I own is not unique […]

Employment and Wages

63 million U.S. jobs, or 44% of all U.S. employees, work in intellectual property (‘IP’) intensive industries that rely on the value created by patents, trademarks or copyrights.  That’s from a report published by the USPTO.In other highlights from the report, employees of IP-intensive industries are likely to: The highest incomes are in copyright-intensive industries (that’s content […]