A registered trade mark does important things for your business. Two of these are: It prevents others from infringing your brand; and It can be used as an absolute defence against some else alleging that you infringe their registered Trade Mark. Most...
Continue ReadingIt is an almost daily occurrence in modern life. You sign up to a web service and get confronted with a tick box asking you to agree to terms and conditions. When people do this, though, they often believe that well-known and trusted corporates have...
Continue ReadingThe concept of a profession dictating the subject matter of invention is artificial. Anyone in any profession can invent anything. In fact, most innovation occurs at the boundaries between professions because the space is less crowded. A more useful question to ask is which employers...
Continue ReadingCrowd Sourcing requires that whatever is being crowdsourced be described to excite your potential investors or to get their assistance. If you are crowdsourcing to find prior art to invalidate a patent that you are currently infringing, you have in effect let a large pool of...
Continue ReadingThe most recent sale (and probably one of the most expensive too) that I can think of is that of ARM Holdings to Softbank for US$31 billion. ARM has 4,500 granted or pending patents. ARM produces the designs (not the chips themselves) for the chips...
Continue ReadingThere are many reasons someone might want to claim and/or enforce copyright in a creation. Some of these reasons include: So they can make money out of it. This is the one most people think about first. So they can prevent the distribution of their...
Continue ReadingI recently had an inventor who was very proud of his invention and had never seen anything like it before. He had a prototype that he had knocked up himself. It was a simple mechanical device, and it was exceedingly effective at solving a very...
Continue ReadingIn Australia, extensions can be generous, provided there is evidence to back up why the deadline was missed. There will need to be a very good explanation for missing more than 10 years of maintenance fees! It depends on the local patent laws. This is not...
Continue ReadingBusinesses sold with patented technology and a sales track record for products covered by those patents often sell for much higher prices than the patents alone. At first, this might seem counter-intuitive until you understand an important truth about patents: they are nothing more than a...
Continue ReadingAI engines are now starting to catch on. IBM’s Watson (the one that won at Jeopardy) and others are starting to make sense of a lot of documents that take humans a long time to process accurately in comparison. If you can find a function...
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