The Legacy Approach: For decades, patent attorneys have been taught to submit claims to the USPTO that are as broad as possible. The theory is that submission of broad claims are opening gambits in a negotiation process that will ultimately yield the correct scope of claims for the applicant.
The Current Situation: The patent prosecution situation [...]
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 patents, [...]
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 information [...]
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 of public [...]