Securing Innovation

Manning & Napier, Inc. Celebrates IPO on NYSE

IP — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 14:11:20 -0500

Manning & Napier, Inc. (NYSE-Listed MN) visited the NYSE to celebrate the company’s successful completion of its initial public offering. In honor of the occasion, founder William Manning rang The Opening Bell.

Congratulations to our friends and colleagues at Manning & Napier on their success.

Steve Jobs Day: Here's to the Crazy Ones

IP — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 10:09:17 -0500

Governor Jerry Brown announced that Sunday, October 16, 2011 is "Steve Jobs Day" in California, where the life of the Apple co-founder will be remembered in private memorials and a public television documentary, iGenius: How Steve Jobs Changed the World on the Discovery Channel. Here's to Steve Jobs; here's to the crazy ones who think different.

What Would Steve Jobs Teach Your Children?

IP — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 01:39:10 -0500

In 2005, Steve Jobs gave the commencement address to the graduating students at Stanford. He told them the secret that defined him in every action, every decision, every creation of his life:

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

via Mashable

Ground Zero, Twin Towers Model

IP — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 10:45:48 -0500

As we approach the 10 year anniversary of the attack on the World Trade Center on 9/11, it's interesting to reflect on this architectural model of "ground zero" in 3D on this tragic day in history, looking forward to the future.

We've written about innovative 3D Printing, and linked to some amazing presentations of the technology here and here, in connection with industrial design, but this is a stunning example of the application of the art and science of 3D printing in architectural design modelling.

3D Printing: A Head of Its Time?

IP — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 07:40:18 -0500

MakerBot sent Stephen Colbert's head into space on a weather balloon with a FlipCam and a GPS enabled cell phone. Includes epic space footage!

Seriously, folks, 3D Printing seems to have really taken off, with the development of a drone that takes just a week to create. Watch the video of the first flight of a 3D printed airplane and read all about it at New Scientist.

Prior Art? Printing Innovation in 3D

IP — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 14:02:23 -0500

A 3-D printer from Z Corporation ranges in price between $15,000 and $60,000, but Joe Titlow, the vice president of product management, said the value outweighs the price for these companies. "This technology enables the ability to create physical models," said Titlow in an interview with ABC News. "It enables them to do something amazing and increase innovation; they can design a product, print it out and get instant feedback of their model." The Z Corporation printers don't just print models and sculptures, but fully operable wrenches, tools and even parts for a car.

According to Z Corporation, these printers have been sold to Motorola, Nike and Toyota.

Is this true?

Don't believe it?

Michael Mock of Rapidform responds to some questions about the feasibility of printing a functional wrench from scan data from a Z Corp 3D scanner, as seen in the video embedded above, which has seen over 5.4 million views on YouTube.

Design prototyping technologies are the modern tools of inventors and other companies, like 3D Systems and Axis Prototypes also appear to be doing interesting work for innovative clients.

Who else is using amazing technologies to help inventors visualize and prototype their innovations? Let us know in the comments below.

Tweet of the Week: @EPOorg + @Ipkat

IP — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 10:16:57 -0500

IBM's 100 Icons of Progress

IP — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 14:32:43 -0500

Congratulations to IBM on 100 years of innovation.

In the span of a century, IBM has evolved from a small business that made scales, time clocks and tabulating machines to a globally integrated enterprise with more than 400,000 employees and a strong vision for the future. The stories that have emerged throughout our history are complex tales of big risks, lessons learned and discoveries that have transformed the way we work and live.

These 100 iconic moments—these Icons of Progress—demonstrate our faith in science, our pursuit of knowledge and our belief that together we can make the world work better.

The number of patents obtained in the United States and in many other countries around the world hardly begins to tell the story of innovation by IBM.

For every invention that is patented by IBM, there are probably thousands more inventions and innovations that are not patented but are protected intellectual property in defensive publications or technical disclosures. As well as leading in patents, IBM has been a leader in the effective use of defensive publishing for over half a century. IBM's Technical Disclosure Bulletin and all its technical disclosures since 1958 have been published as part of IP.com's Prior Art Database.

The recent addition of IBM Redbooks to the IP.com Intellectual Property Library is an effective extension of the ongoing collaboration between IP.com and IBM to make their non-patent literature and technical disclosures easily accessible to patent examiners and inventors everywhere.

Congratulations, IBM, on a century of achievements that have changed the world.

Prior Art Research & Patent Search Services

IP — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 12:33:09 -0500

IP.com's Intellectual Property Research and Analytics provides innovative companies with high quality patent searching, analysis, and more. We embrace the philosophy that to assist our clients in meeting their challenges, we must also continuously innovate. Many on our team are inventors themselves; all have deep knowledge and technical expertise in their fields.

IP.com research and analytics professionals are engineers and scientists with backgrounds in physics, optical engineering, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, materials science, chemistry, and life sciences. All our research professionals have many years of experience practicing in their respective industries as well as several years of experience performing intellectual property research.

How Refrigeration Improved Hockey

IP — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 18:01:56 -0500

With the 2011 Stanley Cup Playoffs heating up between the Boston Bruins and the Vancouver Canucks in June, we got thinking how important refrigeration is to the game of hockey.

The modern rules of ice hockey were drawn up in 1875 by James Creighton of McGill University in Canada, but the first artificial ice rink, called the Glaciarium, had long before been developed by a Brit, in 1844, and John Gamgee later constructed an artificial ice rink in a tent in a small building just off the Kings Road in Chelsea, London, in 1877.

The rink was based on a concrete surface, with layers of earth, cow hair and timber planks. Atop these were laid oval copper pipes carrying a solution of glycerine with ether, nitrogen peroxide and water. The pipes were covered by water and the solution was pumped through, freezing the water into ice. Gamgee had discovered the process while attempting to develop a method to freeze meat for import from Australia and New Zealand, and had patented it as early as 1870.

A century after the first artificial ice rink, an American, Frank Zamboni, invented the world's first self-propelled ice resurfacing machine, which he trademarked the ZAMBONI® ice resurfacing machine. By the summer of 1949 he was able to get a good sheet of ice consistently, and the "Model A Zamboni Ice Resurfacer" became a working reality. Frank applied for a patent and in 1953, Patent Application No. 93,478 was granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office as patent number US 2642679.

Sports fans, is there no end to refrigeration innovation?

Blawg Review #311

IP — Mon, 30 May 2011 09:45:24 -0500

This year, we're honored to host Blawg Review on Memorial Day, 2011.

When I was a kid, we called May 30 "Decoration Day." writes Oliver North in his Memorial Day blog post.

We've hosted Blawg Review, the roundup of some of the best law blog posts of the previous week a few times before here on IP.com's Securing Innovation blog--on Dia del Inventor, on Father's Day and, last year, on the International Day of the World's Indigenous People.

As it's hosted every Monday on a different blog, often marking a special day or theme, this is not the first Memorial Day Blawg Review. It's not even the first time a law blog concerned with patents has hosted Blawg Review on Memorial Day. Stephen Albainy-Jenei, a patent attorney well-known and highly regarded by readers of this blog and his peers in the intellectual property community hosted Blawg Review on Patent Baristas on Memorial Day a few years ago--a stunning presentation, including this poignant photograph.

“Behind each hero, there is a family. Behind each sacrifice, there is a story of survival.”

Some heroes, like John Hochfelder's father, made it home from war and, for them. the memories of those who didn't are most cherished.

This week, Eric Mayer at the Military Underdog blog wrote in a Memorial Day letter to dad, "In these times, I question what to do at Memorial Day. What, with the War on Terror and all the other stuff happening, it seems honors for Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, and Marines occur every day. It makes me wonder why we even have a Memorial Day."

A Soldier's Perspective on President Obama's Memorial Day Proclamation.

For over two centuries, brave men and women have laid down their lives in defense of our great Nation. These heroes have made the ultimate sacrifice so we may uphold the ideals we all cherish. ~ President Barack Obama

Kevin Gosztola on WL Central, writes about Memorial Day in America: What the US Government Wants Americans to Remember vs. What WikiLeaks Thinks Should Be Remembered.

In other news, U.S. Archivist Agrees to Release Pentagon Papers after 40 Years…Except for 11 Words.

Paul Kennedy at The Defense Rests wrote this week about All the King's horses...

Meanwhile, Scott Greenfield says, "The underlying story is one of those that makes your head explode from its sheer stupidity."

Across the pond, a blawger with whom American lawyers enjoy a special relationship, CharonQC, wrote about injuctions, twitter, and the death of blogging?

Not for Eric Turkewitz, who welcomed new readers, in droves, to his law blog this past week.

Kevin O'Keefe on Twitter points to Read Write Web's coverage of military tech, a Memorial Day Special.

The IPKat's Peer-to-Patent seminar offers you a unique opportunity to discover what Peer-to-Patent is all about, how the UK Intellectual Property Office's experiment will work, how it feels like to participate and what the experts think of it.

Chicago IP Litigation Law blogger Dave Donoghue is enjoying his last days with Lord Stanley's Cup, as Boston Pizza rebrands itself "Vancouver Pizza" --because it's all about good taste.

Speaking of good taste, Matthew David Brozik at Likelihood of Confusion reports on the Tyson tattoo trouble.

Gene Quinn at IP Watchdog wrote about Extortion Patent Style: Small Business in the Troll Crosshairs.

On the Forbes blog, She Negotiates, Victoria Pynchon asks, "Which patent infringement litigation parties (if any) benefit from the inefficiencies in the process?"

Patent Docs reports on the decision and dissent in Therasense while the USPTO tries to make sense of this important case about inequitable conduct.

Much more here in the General Global Week in Review 30 May 2011 from IP Think Tank.

Apparently, the IP Blogdex will be a work in progess.

Finally, lest we forget.

The history of Memorial Day.

These are the faces of the fallen.

Maybe the best way to honor the fallen...

Blawg Review has information about next weeks host, and instructions on how to host one of the upcoming issues on your blog if you're up for the challenge.

State of the Art of Motorized Cycles

IP — Wed, 11 May 2011 10:26:57 -0500

Intellectual Property attorneys affiliated with the Shark Tank Season 2 production contacted IP.com in 2010 to perform FTO/Clearance searching on the innovations and products being marketed by the contestants of the Shark Tank Season 2 cast.

Freedom to operate searches identify potential patent barriers to the commercialization of products or technologies.

IP.com conducted over 60 freedom to operate research projects on various aspects of the products being marketed by the contestants in order to provide the attorneys affiliated with the show the information necessary to perform due diligence analysis of the intellectual property associated with the contestants' inventions, products and services.

There's a similar show in Canada, Dragon's Den, on which we saw a Canadian inventor, Ben Gulak, pitch his invention, the Uno, a motorized cycle. Benjamin Gulak has filed a patent appliication with the USPTO for this motorized cycle.

"Why not take this invention to Toyota?" say the Dragons. Or, let's say, Honda.

Honda is a leading innovator of motorized cycles, personal mobility devices, robotic balance and agility. Just ask Asimo.

Yikes! We saw a cyclist riding the streets of Toronto, Canada, on a Yike Bike, the brainchild of Grant Ryan, an inventor from New Zealand, who has filed an international patent application for this.

Steve van Dulken, Information Expert with the British Library Research Service, recently wrote on The Patent Search Blog about the international patent application for the YikeBike®.

Earth Day Science, Not Science Fiction

IP — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 19:13:57 -0500

Earth Day is "a time of year when the voice of the environmentally conscious is at its loudest. It's a time to a talk about the state of the planet, energy innovation and what all of us in the mainstream can do to help curb climate change."

Earth Day Network is a driving force steering environmental awareness around the world. Founded by the organizers of the first April 22 Earth Day in 1970, Earth Day Network promotes environmental citizenship and year round progressive action worldwide. Through Earth Day Network, activists connect change in local, national, and global policies. Earth Day Network enjoys partnerships with 22,000 organizations in 192 countries that are all dedicated to diversifying and mobilizing the environmental movement. Earth Day is the only event celebrated simultaneously around the globe by people of all backgrounds, faiths and nationalities. More than a half billion people participate in Earth Day Network campaigns every year. This year's campaign is a billion acts of green.

Earth Day seems as good a day as any to note the contributions of leading corporations that have joined together in partnership with the World Business Council for Sustainable Development to make their patents available for the common good.

Eco-Patent Commons, launched by IBM, Nokia, Pitney Bowes and Sony in partnership with the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), was founded on the commitment that anyone who wants to bring environmental benefits to market can use these patents to protect the environment and enable collaboration between businesses that foster new innovations.

Since the launch of the Eco-Patent Commons in January 2008, one hundred eco-friendly patents have been pledged by eleven companies representing a variety of industries worldwide: Bosch, Dow, DuPont, Fuji-Xerox, IBM, Nokia, Pitney Bowes, Ricoh, Sony, Taisei and Xerox.

We hope more companies join in the Eco-Patent Commons and that this important initiative expands beyond patents to include technical disclosures of innovations that would be helpful to the environment and the future of planet earth, making every day "earth day."

For over 40 years, Earth Day—April 22—has inspired and mobilized individuals and organizations worldwide to demonstrate their commitment to environmental protection and sustainability. What can we do?

As indicated in our original post about the Eco-Patent Commons, IP.com would really like to contribute to this very worthwhile initiative by providing the publishing platform to broaden the scope of the project to include innovations and inventions useful to the environmental movement well beyond those patents that have been contributed by the project's founding companies, some of which are already using the IP.com Prior Art Database. We've got technologies available that could very quickly take this green initiative to a whole new level of global participation.

Together, let's save our planet; we're really not going to discover another earth.

IP.com CEO on Got Invention Radio

IP — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 10:15:19 -0500

Thursday, April 14th at 8:00 p.m. EST, Tom Colson, CEO of IP.com will be talking live on GOT INVENTION RADIO. Listeners may call or email questions to host Brian Fried during the show at 877-474-3302 or brian@gotinvention.com.

Among the topics Tom will be addressing are:

Patents defined. (What a patent is and is not; different types; rights and protections of a patent; ways to get around a patent.)
Assessing the need for a patent. (When/under what circumstances should an individual inventor be going out and be spending money on a patent?)
Alternatives to patenting. (Covering defensive publishing, trade secrets, use of Non-Disclosure Agreements, or NDA, in advance of patent application, and use of search to determine validity.)
International filing. (How to protect in other countries. And... Manufacturing in China and what that means with respect to an inventor's patent rights.)

Please help spread the word on your blogs and Twitter. And don't forget to tune in at 8pm EST on Thursday, April 14.

How to tune in? Just go to http://www.gotinvention.com and click on the "Live" tab.

Shhh... It's National Library Week

IP — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 16:54:06 -0500

This National Library Week, join our nation’s librarians in making some noise about the value of libraries.

IP.com knows the value of libraries and appreciates the good work of all the librarians who keep safe and accessible the non-patent literature in the Prior Art Database published in print as well as digital formats.

The IP.com Journal is the print and CD counterpart to the IP.com Prior Art Database. The IP.com Journal is published twice per month. It contains all disclosures digitally notarized and made available since the previous publication. It may also contain some disclosures which have been marked to appear in the print journal prior to being made available online. The IP.com Journal is just one of the methods that IP.com employs to ensure that disclosures published to our databases are permanent and forever available. Each edition of the journal is distributed to libraries around the world .

So, here's to libraries!

The Woman Who Invented Viagra

IP — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 14:39:06 -0500

Dr. Gill Samuels, director of vascular biology at Pfizer, oversaw the discovery of compounds for reducing hypertension and migraines. More famously, she was part of a team of thousands working at Pfizer that invented Viagra, as she humbly lets everyone know.

The discovery, she said, came in 1985 after 13 years of intense team work and laboratory experiments. She said: "We were looking at various disorders in vascular contraction when we came across this new class of compound that could relax blood vessels. I have heard people call it a lifestyle drug but I don't think of it like that. It has caused men to think differently about their health. It has de-stigmatised erectile health and as someone who had to review all the letters of patients, who say 'It has stopped me killing myself' or 'It has stopped me hitting my wife', that I realise what a good medicine it is," she said.

Since becoming available in 1998, sildenafil, the chemical name of the little blue pill known as Viagra, has been the a leading treatment for erectile dysfunction; its primary competitors on the market are tadalafil (Cialis) and vardenafil (Levitra).

Pfizer's patent 5,250,534 in the USPTO for Viagra will expire on March 27, 2012, according to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on its website here, at which point any drug company will be able to make and sell a "generic" version of the blockbuster erectile dysfunction (ED) drug.

So, what will happen when Viagra goes generic?

Inventors, Entrepreneurs, Pitch Mark Cuban

IP — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 12:42:59 -0500

Mark Cuban joins the second season of Shark Tank which premieres tonight on ABC. Mark was an entrepreneur from the early age of 12, when he sold garbage bags door-to-door, so he knows what it's like to start from the ground up.

Today, Mark Cuban is the highly successful entrepreneur and investor who founded HDNet, Broadcast.com and MicroSolutions. He has also been an investor in startups, including Mahalo, JungleCents.com, motionloft.com, Filesanywhere.com, Naked Pizza and 140Fire.com.

When he's not busy owning the Dallas Mavericks, Mark is the owner and chairman of HDNet HDNet and its sister network, HDNet Movies, are one of the few remaining independently owned and operated TV Networks in the U.S. and the first in the world to be programmed exclusively in high definition. Mark takes personal responsibility for the programming on both networks, creating a unique schedule of creative and original programs.

On the second season of the Shark Tank, Mark Cuban joins another new shark, Jeff Foxworthy, and veteran sharks Barbara Corcoran, Daymond John, Kevin Harrington, Kevin O'Leary, and Robert Herjavec.

What else is new for Season 2?

Freedom to operate searches identify potential patent barriers to the commercialization of products or technologies.

Find out more about the products and services pitched on the Shark Tank tv show.

We'll be watching.

Discover Intellectual Property at IP.com

IP — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 09:51:17 -0500

IP.com is a global leader in intellectual property management, connecting innovators, IP professionals, industry, and academia to a vast array of patent and non-patent literature. Our public databases, free online search, professional search services, defensive publishing resources, and university network empower users to find highly-relevant intellectual property.

The world’s most innovative corporations entrust IP.com with defensive publication through our acclaimed Prior Art Database — an industry-recognized go-to source for patent examiners and searchers worldwide.

Go beyond just searching — discover an interconnected world of intellectual property at IP.com.

Our weblog, Securing Innovation, designed as a resource for the intellectual property community, includes links to other interesting blogs and useful IP Resources.

Do you know of another intellectual property resource that should be considered for inclusion in this list of helpful IP Resources? Help us out here. Please let us know in the comments below, and we'll add more to our blog's sidebar. While we're updating our blog sidebars, are there additional Intellectual Property Blogs that we should include in our blogrolls? Something new? We're always looking for new IP Blogs, Tech Blogs and Business Blogs that would be of interest to our readers.

Make THE Difference: a new brand vision

IP — Sun, 20 Mar 2011 15:04:35 -0500

TMB (Thai Military Bank) has launched a new brand vision "Make THE Difference" by making a film to inspire people to start thinking differently. We think you'll appreciate the innovation.

Alexander Graham Bell & Elisha Gray

IP — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 04:59:23 -0500

On this date, March 7, in 1876, Alexander Graham Bell was issued a patent numbered 174,465 [see pdf] for an "improvement in telegraphy" or, what some consider to have been the most lucrative innovation in history -- the telephone.

What preceded the grant of this patent to Alexander Graham Bell over his competitor Elisha Gray is the stuff of intellectual property legend, the classic "race to the patent office" as it is often characterized in the telling.

It's interesting, today, while Congress considers a bill named the "America Invents Act" an act to amend the Patent Act, in which one of the fundamental changes proposed it a move to a first-to-file system, similar to many other jurisdictions, versus the current US patent system based on first-to-invent priority.

The legal significance of this proposed change in the Patent Reform Act of 2011 is being discussed this week on leading patent blogs, like Patently-O, here and here. It's interesting, today, as a backgrounder to the story of the Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray patent application controversy, the details of which are summarized in Wikipedia.

Alexander Graham Bell was a tutor for the deaf while pursuing his own research into a method of telegraphy that could transmit multiple messages over a single wire simultaneously, a so-called "harmonic telegraph". Bell formed a partnership with two of his students' parents, including prominent Boston lawyer Gardiner Hubbard, to help fund his research in exchange for shares of any future profits.

Elisha Gray was a prominent inventor in Highland Park, Illinois. His Western Electric company was a major supplier to telegraph monopoly Western Union. Bell was in competition with Elisha Gray to be the first to invent a practical harmonic telegraph.

In the summer of 1874, Gray developed a harmonic telegraph device using vibrating reeds that could transmit musical tones, but not intelligible speech. In December 1874 he demonstrated it to the public at Highland Park First Presbyterian Church. On February 11, 1876, Gray included a diagram for a telephone in his notebook. On February 14, Gray's lawyer filed a patent caveat with a similar diagram. The same day, Bell's lawyer filed (hand-delivered to the U.S. Patent Office) a patent application on the harmonic telegraph, including its use for transmitting vocal sounds. On February 19, the patent office suspended Bell's application for three months to give Gray time to submit a full patent application with claims, after which the patent office would begin interference proceedings to determine whether Bell or Gray were first to invent the claimed subject matter of the telephone.

At the time, the USPTO required the submission of a working patent model for the patent application to be accepted, with the acceptance process often taking years, and with interference proceedings often involved public hearings—although the U.S. Congress had abolished the requirement for patent models in 1870.[1] However, Bell's lawyers argued strenuously for an exception to be made in their case, likely on the basis of the Congressional amendment to the patent law.

On February 24, 1876, Bell traveled to Washington DC. Nothing was entered in his lab notebook until his return to Boston on March 7. Bell's patent was issued on March 7. On March 8, Bell recorded an experiment in his lab notebook, with a diagram similar to that of Gray's patent caveat (see right). Bell finally got his telephone model to work on March 10, when Bell and his assistant Thomas A. Watson both recorded the famous "Watson, come here" story in their notebooks.

How differently might the controversy have played out between Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray if, back in the day, they'd had today's intellectual property technology, like the Creative Registry and the Prior Art Database, to establish authoritatively, who was the first to invent?