Category: Featured
The Name Game: Trademark Your Way to a Deal
Most inventors don’t realize that you can, in fact, license an idea based on a trademark.
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Just Imagine
Aided by—and being weaned on—high-tech gadgets, kids have never had more potential to innovate. Their pristine, innocently hopeful imaginations are not cluttered with practical constraints, their inventing goals seldom with self-centered intent.
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Marley Judgment Upheld
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit issued a memorandum on January 9, affirming a U.S. District judge’s 2017 grant of partial summary judgment in Hope Road Merchandising v. Jammin Java Corp. The Ninth Circuit’s decision upheld a nearly $2.5 million damages award for trademark infringement in favor of Hope Road, the licensing and merchandising arm for Marley’s family, against the coffee distributor.
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U.S. Leaps in Patent Rights
The United States again achieved the top overall ranking as the strongest intellectual property regime in the world.
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Tears to Triumph
The Cupcake Rack inventor overcomes the heartbreaks of inventing—and life—with help from friends.
“I didn’t have a leg to stand on! I was horrified, it was Christmastime, everyone was on vacation, and I was bawling my eyes out every single day.” —Liz Crouch
A neurosurgeon told family members there was no hope; her infant grandson’s brain was swelling, his skull fractured, a leg broken.
Wanna Get Lucky?
How to make your own breaks as an inventor.
One of the biggest mistakes you can make as an inventor is to have expectations of someone you don’t know. That’s not only unfair to them, it’s unfair to you.
Try to make connections and appointments before you go to a trade show. Then you’re different from most of the attendees because your contacts will be expecting to see you.
State of the Union
Comprehensive survey of real patent transaction pricing shows a strong market.
Data indicate that prices for brokered patents are higher than for auctioned patents, and there is a clear price premium for EOUs (evidence of use, meaning patents that appear to be infringed).
Climate Control Gets Personal
Team’s wearable device provides comfort, can save natural resources.
“What we discovered was that there are two dimensions of temperature”—what a thermostat is set to, and how that feels.
—Sam Shames, Embr Labs CTO
Action Sought on Iconic Jordan Photo
Photographer wants SCOTUS to take up his case against Nike.
The image features Michael Jordan in mid-air and flying toward a basketball hoop with his left arm and both legs outstretched.
The Challenges of Patenting Software
Be ready to act quickly, before technologies change “Software is difficult to prove as novel and...
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Making a Mark With Action
10 questions with Mary Boney Denison, USPTO commissioner for trademarks.
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Talk’s Tide is Turning
USPTO has been a source of historic anticipation, action in 2018.
IP experts were cautiously optimistic after Andrei Iancu was named director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office but said action would be the true barometer of progress. They didn’t have to wait long.
Revised standard operating procedures for the Patent Trial and Appeal Board were hailed as likely “game-changing.”
