Can a slogan be a trademark?
A trademark can be many things: a word, a symbol, a logo, a name, and even a slogan. A trademark can really be anything that signifies the source of the product or service and that also distinguishes it from others. …
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A Lesson in Copyrights and Licensing from The Verve
Do you remember the song Bittersweet Symphony? It was a huge hit around the world in 1997, used in movies, TV shows, and commercials. It has been sampled many times for re-use in other songs. The hit was written and performed…
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Is Web Scraping Legal?
I had a friend get in touch with me a while back about the legalities of web scraping. He found, and I’m finding too, a tremendous lack of information about web scraping. I think this is a result of there being so many strange ramifications depending on the many variables in the facts of each situation. I got interested in the legal issues involved in web scraping, and so I put together a hypothetical to test some of them out.
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How to Patent an Idea
Sorry, you can’t. You can’t patent just “an idea.” It isn’t allowed by the law. Patents are granted only for things, processes, machines, manufactured articles, inventions. Abstract ideas and theories, alone, cannot be patented. Recent Supreme Court law just…
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Job-Creating Patents
In an Op-Ed piece at the New York Times I came across via Patently-O, Paul Michel and Henry Nothhaft argue for the infusion of $1 billion into the Patent Office. What I noticed most in this article was their citation that…
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Filing a Non-Publication Request
Not very long ago, patent applications were maintained in secrecy until they issued as patents. Today, however, an application is published 18 months after its effective filing date, meaning that anyone can see your invention after you file it. By…
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Love, Marriage, Divorce & Patents
Patently-O has some interesting discussion regarding the ownership of a patent after a divorce. The case is Enovsys v. Nextel and stems from Sprint-Nextel’s appeal of a patent infringement verdict. As part of its argument, Sprint claimed that the plaintiff…
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Patents Explained: Claims
At last, the claims! The heart of the patent! Appropriately bringing this series of explanatory posts to an end, the claims conclude a patent. A patent can have one claim or many; generally, though, they’ve got 20 or less because…
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Trademark Resource
Gregory Richardson, over at the Trademarks and Intellectual Property Weblog, has a number of good posts about trademark fundamentals. If you’re in need of trademark help or some TM explanations such as the differences between trade dress and a trademark,…
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Patents Explained: the Detailed Description
Next in my series of posts, a topic probably deceiving the pithy label recently given: the detailed description. This eponymous section of a patent actually needs more explanation than one might garner from its name alone: the detailed description goes beyond…