Like many others, I owe a lot to Steve Jobs. Some of the designs and intellectual property management strategies he pioneered at Apple were, and remain, the subject of my research and teaching. His work, along with that of the many talented people at Apple, continue to inspire me. The New York Times has a [...]
Posted tagged ‘inventors’
Steve Jobs: Creator and Intellectual Property Strategist
October 6, 2011Research Spotlight: Friends of the court: Using Amicus Briefs to Identify Corporate Advocacy Positions in Supreme Court Patent Litigation
October 3, 2011Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management profiled my recent publication, co-authored with Kellogg faculty member James Conley. This work examines amicus (friend of the court) briefs submitted during U.S. Supreme Court patent litigation, and published in the University of Illinois Journal of Law, Technology & Policy.
Several ways to protect a website
July 18, 2010How does one protect a website with great functionality and excellent design? The default is to obtain copyright on the expressive elements of the website. However, these other means are also used: Utility patents can secure innovative functionality as a method/algorithm. For example, Netflix obtained this patent to secure the way its website guides users [...]
Independent Designers: Here’s a Powerful Tool to Combat Knock-Offs
June 19, 2010I’m always troubled when I hear stories about independent designers who are ripped off by knock-off artists, large retail chains and unscrupulous exporters who take advantage of low-cost manufacturing costs to catch a free ride from a designer’s work. Reporter Christina Binkley wrote an interesting article on this very topic in The Wall Street Journal [...]
Top 10 Places for Tech Jobs…And Their Patents
September 17, 2009U.S. News and World Report lists the Top Ten Places for Tech Jobs. The list includes: Atlanta, Boston, Houston, Huntsville, New Yok, Phoenix, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, Washington. It’s an interesting list, and I thought I would do a patent search for inventors based out of these cities. Here are the results I obtained [...]
Vote For Your Favorite Shape Trademark
September 10, 2009My research has led me to a somewhat exotic area: 3-D product shape trademarks. These are rare but powerful forms of intellectual property. They are usually reserved for product shape designs that have iconic characteristics. Their rarity suggests that the average company does not typically invest as much in product design as they should. Here [...]
Back to School
September 1, 2009Attention student innovators. If you have had a revelation for a product that would make dorm life better, visit this site to enter a contest: Students of Invention Contest Just think “lava lamp”.
Lecture in Munich
May 13, 2009Next week I’ll visit Munich, labeled as one of most beautiful cities in Europe to present a paper and lecture at the Max Planck’s Munich Intellectual Property Law Center (MIPLC). The subject of the talk is patent advocacy before the U.S. Supreme Court. My co-author James Conley and I have measured the patent advocacy of [...]
The Patent Piler
April 25, 2009I met Allan Tokuda when I was a Teaching and Research Fellow at Northwestern University. I was helping teach a course on Innovation and Invention in the engineering program. Allan was one of the brighter and more inquisitive students. I knew he had some remarkable qualities when, before class one day, he took out a [...]
