Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with patents

Patent Application Squatting

CollectiveMind — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 15:50:42 -0800

I have an idea that may be patentable. I want to search patent listing websites to see if something like it already exists. But I have heard that some people somehow monitor queries and figure out what a patent is. Then they submit provisional applications to preempt the searcher. I've also heard this happens with website domain names. Does anybody know if its true for patent websites, including the insecure USPTO search page?

How do I find someone to buy/license my patent for silent velcro?

HLS — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 14:01:00 -0800

How do I find someone to buy/license my patent for silent velcro? I know this sounds like a joke, but I have an idea for a new type of "velcro" which is completely silent (also more durable and less bulky than regular velcro). I don't want to manufacture it myself. How do I find someone to sell or license it to?

Thank you!

Increase my Corporate Legal-fu!

lonefrontranger — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 20:35:50 -0800

CorporateLawFilter: Please recommend your best tips, tricks and reference materials for becoming the best paralegal-in-training possible. I was just hired as legal assistant to the senior partner of a pharmaceuticals manufacturing site. We are a department of two, doing primarily corporate/contracts legal, plus a steady dose of IP and patents stuff, and my boss is an amazingly good mentor. He tends to delegate responsibility as I prove capable of it, and he says he needs his admin to be a smart independent thinker who can work unsupervised when necessary and call him on mistakes when he misses stuff (which isn't often).

I have been doing this job on a temp/fill-in basis for the past six months, mainly just keeping afloat on our vanilla confidentiality agreements stuff. Now that I'm no longer a contractor, Boss (and rightfully so) is really raising the bar because he's got a huge workload. He needs, and expects me to become, his Contracts, Patents & Agreements Padawan. The challenge is, while I'm a really good secretary and a damn good document wrangler, I know jack about contract / corporate law, beyond the most basic of proofreading skills. He'll throw odd stuff over the wall to me when he's ultra busy, like asking me to come up with a (very) rough draft of a cease and desist letter from scratch when he's too busy/fried to switch gears and think about the language it needs. This is the sort of thing I need to get better at quickly.

I really want and need to kick ass at this job, not to mention make my boss proud, and ultimately (please god) stay here for the rest of my foreseeable future, complete with stability and benefits and stuff I don't get from being the Eternal Temp. Not to mention that this guy went out on a pretty skinny limb to insist on hiring me, as I've no formal education and next to zero prior contracts/legal experience. BigPharmaCo is footing the bill to send me through a paralegal course, which will absolutely help, however it's going to take some time to get that accomplished, and I need to hit the ground running.

My boss' new-hire/early Christmas present to me was a big, shiny, unabridged Black's Law Dictionary, and I've immediately begun using it... I can already tell that it's going to be indispensable. I have been given permission to order any other reference books I might need on the company dime, so there's a place to start.

Please share any other tips, techniques and/or reference materials that any of you corporate partners and/or bona fide paralegals out there recommend to increase my Corporate/Contracts/Patents Legal-fu.

what's new in technology. I mean really, really new

brandnew — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 04:28:36 -0800

Sites for tracking new technologies, technology trends, and innovations? I've recently been moved into a position that requires me to drive R&D projects and new innovations. I lead a small team that mainly looks at how to apply our existing IP and software to emerging technologies and social contexts.

I've got all the techniques down for turning my team into a gushing innovation factory. However, I struggle in providing the inputs: interesting new social contexts and emerging technologies. Currently I suck down the popular technology news sites and journals, but I always feel that we're behind the curve.

Are there blogs out there (or even subscription services) that discuss emerging technologies, social trends, etc? Perhaps a daily newsletter that showcases interesting new patent submissions, or top-secret products, or hype curves showing where VCs are putting their money?

Selling plants of uncertain ancestry.

Jimbob — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 18:34:37 -0800

Plant breeders' rights question - propagation and sale or plants, when in ignorance of the fact that the plant you're propagating and selling is a registered variety. Say you buy a house, and in the garden is a lovely pink geranium. You decide to take some cuttings from it and grow them. After a while you've got a few dozen new little geraniums growing, some of which you plant in your garden, but you've really got no space to plant them all. So, you put up a sign on your gate - "Geraniums for sale $5".

Now, imagine if the geranium you're selling is actually a registered / patented breed of plant. The sort of thing that, if you bought it in a store, would have a little tag attached saying something like "Propagation and commercial sale of this variety is illegal under the Plant Breeders Rights Act..."

Would you get in trouble, from a practical (detection) point of view, or a legal point of view, for doing this? I'm in Australia for the record, but I'm assuming things would work in a similar way elsewhere. Essentially, are you doing something illegal by selling plants grown from cuttings or seeds that you had no idea, or no simple way of knowing, were registered plant breeds?

Are Table Saws Safe Yet?

GregX3 — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 11:26:45 -0800

A few years ago I saw a video where someone made a table saw technology where if the blade touches your skin it stops immediately and all you get is a knick on your finger. I was curious if this is being built into table saws yet? And if not why isn't it? It would be top on my list of features when I buy one since anything that can cut off my hand scares me.

Should I pursue an e-commerce patent?

subpixel — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 10:22:05 -0800

I'm developing an e-commerce project with business processes that are truly unique and might be patentable. I understand there is serious debate about the benefit and/or validity of many patents in this field, but I think my idea stands up to the bullshit test, and I don't think protecting it would be anti-competitive.

So, should I launch and go about protecting the invention later, or should I hire a patent attorney right away? I've searched the patent databases myself and found nothing remotely similar. But I'm not an expert.

What is a good (free or low-cost) program to mine text from large numbers of patents?

underdetermined — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 16:52:55 -0800

What is a good (free or low-cost) program to mine text from large numbers of patents? I'm looking for a text analysis tool to help me organize information from large numbers of patents into categories or clusters. There are commercial applications that do this, but they are exceedingly expensive. Ideally, I would like to be able to dump the results of my database query into the program and let it go to work to identify relationships between things that are non-intuitive and/or obscured due to huge amounts of information.

Thanks for any suggestions.

Utilize a patent attorney?

tr45vbyt — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 07:41:43 -0800

Should our company utilize a patent attorney for filing patents? I work for an electronic design company. Throughout the past 15 years we have not been patenting any of our products (prior to this we did). The decision has been made to patent designs when warranted.

We are trying to decide if we should utilize a patent attorney to handle the patent submission or if we should designate someone in house to do it. I read a book on the process and it looks pretty straight forward but I am wondering whether the additional cost of utilizing a patent attorney may be worth it (I'm guessing we will patent 2-6 designs per year)?

I would appreciate hearing from other people on whether they do it themselves or use an attorney. I'm also interested in whether there are non-attorney based patent writers and whether anyone has experience with these. I'm also interested in an estimate of what we can expect an attorney to charge.

how do I protect my idea when presenting it to a potential partner?

Izzmeister — Sun, 07 May 2006 19:50:00 -0800

How do I protect myself from someone stealing my idea? I have a meeting scheduled for this week to discuss a business idea.

[u]besides walking into the meeting with a nondisclosure agreement[/u], is there any other course of action I can take to protect them from stealing my idea?

The Idea consists of using an existing product and packaging it differently (vauge, I know.) . this leaves me with no real "patentability" on the product.

My question is basically:

Hypothetically, if I could prove that someone took my idea after meeting me and made a product out of it, would I have any recourse against that person, or is that perfectly ok from a legal point of view?

two ideas that I have heard are

1) record the conversation and say someting to the effect of "before i tell you the idea, can I feel comfortable that you would not take the idea and run with it without me?" and have the recording of the question and it's "of course not" response...

and

2) mail myself a letter comtaining the information, which I could then store without opening and showing a postmark of before the meeting.

would either of these two work? and as a rule of thumb, can an unpatented idea be "stolen"?

A patent in which the application is itself an actual example of the invention?

nobody — Fri, 04 Nov 2005 11:59:19 -0800

Are there any approved U.S. patents in which the patent application is itself an instantiation of the patented invention? It struck me that a patent describing a process of relaying a specific story [link to not-yet-approved patent application; discussed on MeFi here] would itself enact a relaying of that story, albeit in a very experimental, bare-bones structural form. Has this level of self-reference ever found its way into approved patents in the past? Examples from other countries would be welcome as well.

where does one start with a new idea for web-based business/service?

specialk420 — Tue, 05 Jul 2005 21:52:04 -0800

if one had a what one would imagine to be a possibly great idea for a web based site/service ... where would one start in this post - post - .com era?

How can I show my work without risking the patent?

hugo — Sun, 21 Nov 2004 05:02:56 -0800

Portfolio Confidentiality

I'm applying for a job with an industrial design firm which requires a portfolio. Some of my best work is part of a project which is in the process of being patented (but has not been filed for yet), so I'm unsure how to handle it. It seems excessive and limiting (and maybe rude?) to ask for an NDA from a potential employer, but I don't feel completely comfortable sending this information out. Anyone have any suggestions or experience in this area?

When does the patent on the mp3 file format expire?

gwint — Thu, 22 Jul 2004 08:27:41 -0800

The GIF patent finally expired (Woohoo!) which got me wondering: When does the mp3 patent expire? I couldn't get google to cough up the answer.

Toys Invented - Now What?

interrobang — Tue, 30 Mar 2004 23:51:03 -0800

I've invented two toys. One is kid-friendly and easy to produce, and the other would require a plastic mold-injection process (so I can't possibly make a mock-up) but rave-kids would go nuts for it.

Obviously - I guess - I can't say what they are, since I'm afraid of people stealing my ideas. What do I do? Should I just email companies and tell them what my ideas are? Will they steal my ideas, or is it company policy to honor the inventor? The "kid's toy" one could be easily included in a "Klutz" kid's book, by the way. It's flat.