Just because something is protected by copyright doesn’t mean it’s hands-off to you. In some situations, you are allowed to reproduce such material. Newscasts rely on this exception to copyright protection often, showing clips of movies, tv shows, commercials. A…
The Patent Office has a nice flowchart on its website that describes the patenting process. It could be helpful to give the inventor an understanding of the road in front of him when he comes up with an invention and…
Patent applications typically take quite a while to become actual patents. It’s currently taking between 2 and 4 years just to get the First Office Action from the Patent Office. There are a few ways to speed up the examination…
Fellow Harvey Mudd College grad Janet Hansen, who is President and Chief Fashion engineer of Enlighted Designs, has found, perhaps inadvertently, a way to combat the inability to get copyright protection in clothing design. While you generally can’t protect the…
Marking your work with a copyright notice does a number of things: – notifies the public that the work is protected by copyright and that the owner takes that protection seriously – distinguishes the work as not being in the…
With the D: All Things Digital conference going on right now, there is a great video posted over on Kara Swisher’s digital column: an interview of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs at the D5 conference back in 2007. Interesting to…
Did you miss a deadline with the Patent Office or pay the wrong fee? Doing these things, and some others, can cause your application to become abandoned. An abandoned application isn’t necessarily dead. You have a couple of options. First,…
When you purchase a trademark, there is no requirement that you record the sale, but it sure is a good idea. Why? Take this example: Owner A sells a trademark (and the underlying goodwill) to buyer B. Buyer B never…
Please, lawyers, please, stop writing “X statute provides in pertinent part.” Several reasons. First,you’re probably not using it right, because you’re quoting the whole statute. Second, if you’re only quoting part of the statute, then your use of ellipses will…
I blogged about open-source solutions a bit ago, and it looks like the open-source / crowdsourcing / community-based design approach is being applied again. GE is soliciting ideas from the public for their next ad campaign. Another example of leveraging…