With hundreds of millions of people involved in online piracy each month, unauthorized file-sharing costs entertainment industry companies and content owners billions of dollars each year. To address this problem, NBC Universal has patented a system for detecting high-volume peer-to-peer file-sharing activity. Peer-to-peer file sharing…
Under U.S. patent law, patent-eligible subject matter includes “any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof”. The U.S. Supreme Court has long held that abstract ideas and natural laws, by themselves, are not patent-eligible. A…
Growth in these fields has spurred the development of high-performance microchips, including ones from IBM. Other areas with rapid growth include 3-D printing, cloud technology, and drones. Overall, the most popular category of patents are related to hardware and software for digital data processing. IBM…
Generally, if you create patent-eligible products, including software, while at work or performing your duties as an employee, your employer owns the patent. Under U.S. patent law, the original patent applicant is assumed to be the patent owner, unless there is an assignment of interest…
There is a lot at stake when applying for a patent. Depending on how you write the claims and the specification of your patent application, and how you prosecute the patent in front of the Patent Office, you could lose potential patent rights at any…
Art doesn’t come from nowhere. Cultural progress depends on the ability of artists to make reasonable use of preexisting material, and that includes copyrighted material. This is especially true for filmmakers who operate in today’s media-saturated environment. In order to be able to comment on…
As you may already know, before a patent can be issued, a formal patent application must be filed with the USPTO (United States Patent and Trademark Office). A patent application contains both a description of the invention written in a way to enable others to…
There are many countries around the world that have a system in place for protecting minor inventions, such as Germany, Australia, Japan and South Korea. China has implemented this type of system via utility model patents. The Chinese Utility Model is generally meant to protect…
With the vast amount of open source software available and being actively developed, there is a renewed focus on how open source policies affect patents .
Knowing when to call a patent lawyer about your innovation, design or invention is important. This is especially true for newcomers to the field of intellectual property law, where limited knowledge of how the patent system works, combined with often limited starter resources, can turn…