On September 16, 2011 President Obama signed into law the Leahy-Smith Patent Reform Act, thereby ending the most favorable patent system in the world for legitimate small businesses. The law is lengthy (169 pages) and complex. Furthermore, the provisions of the new law have a variety of effective dates. Some of the provisions are effective […]
When investing in a small company, part of the critical information that investors need to know are (1) whether the product or products produced by the company infringe or will infringe patents owned by others, and (2) the strength of the company’s own patent portfolio. While these questions seem related because they both deal with […]
Obviously, a company should give careful consideration to providing proprietary information to anyone outside the company. Such disclosures should only be made on a strict “need to know” basis. Typically, the outside party agrees to accept the information under conditions that impose a legal obligation on the outside party to maintain and protect the proprietary […]
Generally, there are two ways of transferring intellectual property to others: (1) an assignment, and (2) a license agreement. Assignments: An assignment is a legal document which transfers all the rights in an intellectual property to another. Patent and trademark assignments, for instance, are typically registered with the U.S. patent office and are a matter […]
Business owners and even non-IP attorneys are often confused by intellectual property rights. Because copyrights, patents, trademarks, and trade secrets fall into the rubric of intellectual property, they often believe that each right is treated in the same way as the other rights. For instance, a common belief is that because a business owns the […]
In the U.S., the legal definition of a trade secret varies by state law. Generally, there are three components required before most courts would treat a given piece of information as a trade secret: The information is not generally known to the public; The information confers some sort of economic benefit to its owner (where […]
Since June 8, 1995, the United States Patent Office has offered inventors the option of filing a provisional application (or a “provisional”). According to the patent office, a provisional patent application was designed to provide a lower cost for a first patent filing in the United States and to give U.S. applicants parity with foreign […]
A patent is a government grant or intellectual property right that allows its owner to exclude others from making, using, selling, or importing the claimed invention. Patents are probably the strongest of all intellectual property protection because: A patent protects the underlying concept of an invention. In a computer program, for instance, this usually […]
The term copyright generally refers to the right to make copies. The roots of copyright law can be traced back to the Statute of Anne of 1710 (which was the first English copyright act). This law gave authors the exclusive right to make copies of their books. Today’s copyright law goes much farther in protecting […]
A trademark is a legal mechanism which gives the owner the right to use a word, name, or symbol to identify and distinguish goods of the owner from goods manufactured or sold by others. Trademarks are also used to indicate the source of the goods. In short, a trademark is a brand name. A service […]