When You Care Enough To Send The Very Best® …. you know what you send, a Hallmark® brand card. What if you want to send something a little different this holiday season or you just truly wish to share in the joy of all beliefs?

Ron Coleman, a trademark lawyer and self-styled IP maven, who blogs on trademark, copyright, new media and free speech, hosts this week's Blawg Review #191 celebrating the Festival of Lights.

Click on the link above to see this week's selection of top intellectual property news breaking in the blogosphere and on the internet.

Duncan Bucknell's "online" edition of the GWiR at the link above highlights Wall Street Journal reports Obama, Lessig and Google have shifted their positions on net neutrality; Google, Lessig slam WSJ report , among other stories of interest to the intellectual property community around the world.

Click on the link above to check out IP Think Tank’s weekly selection of top Pharma & Biotech intellectual property news breaking in the blogosphere and internet.

Patent attorneys are a diverse bunch so there’s no one definitive list for gift ideas. Some litigators are always on the go — going to court, depositions and other meetings. Others spend hours upon hours in their offices — generally, working at the computer. Thus, we tried to come up with a list that is versatile and meant only to stimulate some ideas and discussion -- including this last-minute stocking stuffer -- Securing Innovation suggests saving some money and going with Manolo knock-offs.

"That sentence is the entire text of Chapter 19 in Gordon MacKenzie's 1998 Orbiting the Giant Hairball, still the best book on what it takes to be creative in a big company -- or really -- in any company," says Bob Sutton.

Since May 2001, a secondary type of patent, known as an “innovation patent,” has been available under Australian patent law. This underutilised type of patent is extraordinarily useful in several circumstances discussed by Guest Baristas Bill Bennett on the Patent Baristas blog.

"On October 30, 2008, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued its decision in In re Bilski, which dealt a serious blow to software patents and largely did away with business method patents altogether, although there is still some room to receive a patent if the business process employs the use of a new, nonobvious and tangible computer system, but the protection would have to focused on the tangible computer system that employs an overarching architecture and not the process," writes Gene Quinn in a cogent response to Groklaw commenters. Click on the link above to see his post on IP Watchdog.

Expectant father Corey Menscher wanted to “create a device that would give me a chance to be aware of our baby’s movements”. He created a waistband for his wife which sends a Tweet everytime the baby kicks, naming the project “Kickbee”.

Click on the link above to see this week's selection of top intellectual property news breaking in the blogosphere and on the internet.

Duncan Bucknell's "online" edition of the GWiR at the link above highlights news we covered here about Linux Defenders, among other stories of interest to the intellectual property community around the world.

Click on the link above to check out IP Think Tank’s weekly selection of top Pharma & Biotech intellectual property news breaking in the blogosphere and internet.

Defensive publications, endorsed by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office for IP rights management, are records that provide descriptions and artwork of a product, device, or method so that it enters the public domain and becomes prior art. They allow inventors to claim their inventions and prevent others from making later claims against them, without requiring inventors to pay for patent applications. Linux Defenders, will contain a Defensive Publications component with Web-based forms and a "Wiki-style" contribution model. A completed defensive publication will be added to the IP.com database used by attorneys and the Patent and Trademark Office.

The Open Invention Network's new Linux Defenders program will provide funds to help developers pay to to upload patent documentation about their code. The Durham, N.C., intellectual property company said the new Linux Defenders Program will provide funds to help developers pay to to upload documentation about their code to sites like IP.com, a patent database. Keith Bergelt , CEO of OIN, called IP.com the main source of information for patent officials and others researching the viability of a proposed patent.

Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig: How law strangles creativity.

Guy Kawasaki may get more value out of Twitter than anyone else on the planet because he uses Twitter as a tool — specifically as a marketing tool — for his website Alltop, and his books, from The Art of the Start to Reality Check.

Twitter, having been quickly adopted initially by key influencers, has grown into a mass-market communication tool, with millions of users. If you’re publishing content, undertaking online marketing, and looking to keep up with the latest trends in anything web related then Twitter should be featuring highly as a ‘weapon of choice’.

If you just need a summary, Jeremiah Owyang wrote on his blog in a way that you can just read the bolded elements to get a sense of the report, Social networks that matter: Twitter under the microscope, scientific research on Twitter by Bernardo A. Huberman, Daniel M. Romero and Fang Wu.

Adrian over at JDSupra has an excellent list of 500+ attorneys using Twitter. Steve Nipper at The Invent Blog picked through that list, added a few more, and compiled a sub-list of IP attorneys and intellectual property professionals using Twitter. Click the link above.

Companies are stepping up efforts to head off patent problems that could hinder the adoption of new technologies.

Is the Web finally ready for a patent-busting site?

Comprehensive data for the past year reveal strong movement in electronic-book technology. This study will be interesting for our friends at Kent Displays, about which we wrote this week here on the Securing Innovation blog.

This week's law blog carnival follows the Rime of the Ancient Mariner on a journey that takes us to some of the best in the blogosphere, including this post: Maya Richard suggested four tactics to preemptively protect patent assets from patent trolls: monitoring patent filings for applications related to your portfolio; hedging risk with patent infringement insurance; retaining skilled IP counsel to build a case for major patent assets; and joining an industry protection group.

Click on the link above to see this week's selection of top intellectual property news breaking in the blogosphere and on the internet for 5 December 2008.

Click on the link above to check out IP Think Tank’s weekly selection of top Pharma & Biotech intellectual property news breaking in the blogosphere and internet.

Stanford University's Ryan Lampe and Petra Moser saw that regulators favor patent pools as a means to encourage innovation in industries where overlapping patents and excessive litigation cause problems. While the theory appears sound in principle, does the aggregation of patent rights actually spur innovation?

This page is intended to provide information to newer information professionals with an interest in patent information and who are considering making patent information a major part of their career. More info at the link above.

For both startups and well-established businesses, intellectual property is a core asset that drives both innovation and brand development. "As a result, it is crucial to preemptively protective one’s resources from potential challenges by outside firms whose sole business practice is instigating litigation against operating companies," writes guest blogger Maya Richard on Patent Baristas.

Michael Elkon at Trading Secrets reports that on November 21, 2008, Judge Kenneth Karas of the Southern District of New York published his November 7, 2008 Amended Opinion and Order granting IBM’s Motion for Preliminary Injunction against former IBM executive Mark Papermaster ... In evaluating the legal merits of IBM’s Motion, Judge Karas engages in an analysis of whether Papermaster would inevitably disclose the IBM trade secrets known to him.

Bill Patry eulogizes Sir Hugh Laddie, one of the world's leading intellectual property lawyers, who will be sadly missed.