http://www.patentlight.com A Guiding Light for Inventors and Small Business Owners Tue, 03 Aug 2010 17:00:15 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has recently announced that it has prepared further interim guidance for the patent examining corps to use when determining subject matter eligibility under 35 U.S.C. § 101 in view of the recent decision by the United States Supreme Court ... http://www.patentlight.com/?p=150 The Supreme Court issued its ruling in the infamous "In re Bilski" case today.    The bottom line:  Bad news for Bilski, but probably good news for software patent holders. Bilski attempted to claim a hedging method as his invention.  Specifically, “a method of provide one of a good or service to ... http://www.patentlight.com/?p=144 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 ... http://www.patentlight.com/?p=137 While there is no reason to go into the entire history of software patents, it is fair to say that filings of software patents increased exponentially during the 1990s.  In 1998, in a case called State Street Bank & Trust Co. v. Signature Financial Group, Inc., the Federal Circuit held ... http://www.patentlight.com/?p=125 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 ... http://www.patentlight.com/?p=104 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 ... http://www.patentlight.com/?p=101 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 ... http://www.patentlight.com/?p=95 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 ... http://www.patentlight.com/?p=88 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 ... http://www.patentlight.com/?p=75 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 ... http://www.patentlight.com/?p=66