IP.com CEO Speaking at PATINEX 2008

Posted on November 12, 2008 by IP

Johnson Kong, Executive Vice President and Head of Asia Pacific for IP.com Inc., is in Korea with Tom Colson, our CEO, who addressed an international group of thought leaders gathering at PATINEX 2008.

IP.com Inc. CEO Tom Colson's presentation was on Advanced Enterprise Management and IP Strategies.

The keynote address for PATINEX 2008 was by KAIST President Nam-Pyo Suh, who spoke on the Strategy of Patent Information Usage for Finding a New Market.

After this conference, Johnson Kong and Tom Colson are continuing on to Beijing and other centers in Asia that are regular stops for executives from IP.com Inc.

Readers can follow at @ipdotcom on Twitter, where we're following other leaders in the technology space, like Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz. Here's how Jonathan Schwartz explains how Twitter helps him run Sun:

"Communication is a key part of leadership—as CEO, I need to engage the market, inside and outside Sun, with whatever technology affords me the greatest possible reach. Through blogs, online news, social networking sites, or Twitter, the Internet has fundamentally changed how we communicate with one another. Today, we have thousands of employees participating, engaging customers and developers across the world, 24 hours a day. And whether it's via a half-hour streaming video or a 140-character Tweet, we need to reach everyone in the forum and format they choose—not what we choose."

We're working on it, but it's still early days in the integration of Twitter feeds into this blog. However, if you add @ipdotcom to those you're following on Twitter now, you'll be sure to hear more about the latest innovations in intellectual property management and IP strategies. We look forward to reading your "tweets" and following you, too, just like we're following Jonathan Schwartz and Guy Kawasaki on Twitter.

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IP Law Review With Focus On China

Posted on October 26, 2008 by IP

As the world continues to flatten and China remains a leading force for the 21st Century, corporations with large portfolios of intellectual property assets need to develop their ability to work with this rising super power.

IP Law Review, a two day intensive event at the Westin Times Square in New York City on October 29th and 30th, presented by IP Law & Business investigates the federal decisions and industry trends guaranteed to change IP in the financial markets, including:

  • Business Method Patents and In re Bilski
  • Shareholder Derivative Suits Based on Mismanaged IP
  • Protecting your IP in the Emerging Markets

According to the conference overview,  IP Law Review is specifically designed for:

  • General Counsel
  • Chief IP Counsel
  • Chief Patent Counsel
  • Senior IP Counsel
  • IP Litigators
  • IP Advisors
  • IP Portfolio Managers
  • IP professionals involved in protecting and developing copyrights, trademarks and patents

Tom Colson, a registered Patent Attorney and CEO of IP.com, and Johnson Kong, Executive Vice President, Asia Pacific, are establishing new business strategies with companies managing intellectual property in China.

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Intellectual Property Conferences

Posted on September 18, 2008 by IP

As the team here at IP.com gets ready for upcoming conferences that will be attended by hundreds of intellectual property attorneys, we thought it might be helpful to review The Conferencing Manifesto that Matthew Homann has republished on his insightful law blog.

Know Your Questions. Seek Your Answers. Never attend a conference without at least three questions you want answered. Never leave until they have been.

Their Conference is Your Focus Group. Want to measure the pulse of the marketplace? Want feedback on your idea, product, or business model? Go to a conference populated by your ideal customer. Forget the sessions. Hang out in the hallway. And listen. A lot.

Be Smart. Be Helpful. Then Be Quiet. Other attendees may have come to the conference to meet people like you. They may want and deserve your help (and you, theirs). They didn’t come to hear your hour-long presentation. Please understand the difference.

Paper Works Best. Your ability to pay attention to conference speakers and attendees is inversely proportional to your ability to pay attention to the outside world. Stow the laptop, turn off the BlackBerry, pull out the Moleskine, and start writing. Oh, and if you can’t leave the real world behind for an hour or two, please don’t leave it at all.

Blogging is not Participation. We get it. Your blog has tens/hundreds/thousands of readers who can’t wait to hear your take on the last speaker’s presentation and about how crappy the WiFi is. Your “audience” will be there tomorrow. Your fellow attendees will not.

The most important people at the conference are sitting next to you. Think Tom Peters gives a rat’s ass about your new business strategy? Is Seth Godin going to give you personalized marketing advice? Of course not. The people at any event who are most likely to have already faced your challenges (and maybe even solved them) aren’t the highly-paid keynoters, but rather your fellow attendees. They are like you. They can help you. Ignore them at your peril.

Vendors Matter. Vendors are like puppies. They crave your attention. Give it. They know your industry and the other attendees better than you do. Talk with them. Learn from them. Then take a few pens.

If, by chance, you're going to be at the 2008 Annual Meeting of the Intellectual Property Owners Association on September 21-23 in San Diego, please stop by and visit IP.com and the other exhbitors in the Exhibitor Hall.

If you miss us there, you can catch up with IP.com's Michael Inglisa next month in Washington, DC at the Annual Meeting of the Intellectual Property Law Association between October 23-25.

Hopefully, you'll find some effective tools for management of intellectual property assets that your law firm's clients might thank you for discovering.

IP.com, Inc. is the global leader in providing strategic and reliable intellectual property solutions. The world's largest and most innovative companies trust IP.com for their enterprise-wide intellectual property asset management, defensive publishing, and patent search services. With IP.com’s comprehensive suite of products, companies can effectively maximize the value of their Intellectual Property. Utilizing workflows and roles-based access, IP.com can help you to capture and safeguard your innovation from its earliest stages, streamline your IP decision-making processes, reduce your R&D costs, and accelerate your time to market - all within a secure collaborative environment. Ultimately, IP.com will help you to protect and maximize your company’s most critical asset, your intellectual property.

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Exec Pleads Guilty to Stealing Trade Secrets

Posted on July 15, 2008 by IP
Law.com reports that an executive who worked at IBM for nearly a decade pleaded guilty to stealing trade secrets about the company's pricing and trying to pass them off to his superiors at rival Hewlett-Packard  when he took a job there. Atul Malhotra, 42, faces up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine on the single count of theft of trade secrets, prosecutors said.

The Wall Street Journal Law Blog apparently got through to John Vandevelde, Malhotra’s attorney, who reportedly called his client “an honorable man with an impeccable record” who “made one mistake in transitioning from one high-tech job to another.”

It's noted that HP and IBM cooperated with the prosecution in this case. HP said it detected the activity, fired Malhotra and turned the information over to law enforcement. His employment at HP lasted five months. IBM declined to comment on the case.

News of the guilty plea in this criminal prosecution was posted on Trading Secrets, the new law blog authored by the attorneys of the Trade Secrets, Computer Fraud, & Non-Competes practice group of Seyfarth Shaw LLP, who protect and defend clients against those who improperly handle proprietary information, violate non-compete agreements, improperly solicit customers or remove electronic data from businesses, and raid employees. This looks like a great new intellectual property law blog, so we've added a link to Trading Secrets in our list of IP Blogs in the sidebar on the left.

It's always big news whenever an executive is caught stealing trade secrets, sometimes with the cooperation of companies as competitive as Coke and Pepsi. Savvy companies would much rather protect their trade secrets and not rely on the goodwill and ethical management of their biggest competitors to prevent the loss of valuable intellectual property. After all, a trade secret is only enforceable if reasonable safeguards are in place to maintain its secrecy.

We're unabashedly enthusiastic about IP.com's effective technical solutions that secure innovation and protect intellectual property. InnovationQ provides key tools for effective Trade Secret Management that enable proactive, innovative companies to secure trade secrets as an economic and strategic component of their IP portfolio.

Others might rely on criminal prosecutions, lawsuits against competitors and former employees, and voluntary water torture to discover leaks.
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How IP.com Supports Copyrights

Posted on March 22, 2008 by IP
In the real world you create work on a regular and ongoing basis. However, it typically is not created in a single sitting, nor is it written from beginning to end without editing and changing. The fact is your work is dynamic and evolves over time. Outside factors influence your work, causing you to make edits, changes and wholesale replacements of large parts of it. This complicates decisions as to when it might be appropriate or valuable to register your copyright.

Further, because most work is done electronically, you have the added burden of proving what you wrote (or created) and when you wrote it in order to establish your copyrights for unregistered material…which could represent the bulk of what you do.

IP.com created two legal safeguarding solutions specifically to help you prove the date and content of your creative work so as to ensure you will be able to leverage your copyright protection for that work. These affordable products are designed to legally safeguard your work in the context of the real world…the way you live and work. Legal safeguarding is the process of creating a digital fingerprint and date-stamp of your work, then registering that fingerprint into the public domain as public evidence of your work and thus your copyright proof. The actual creative work is never exposed to others so your privacy is ensured while you gain this valuable means of proving what you wrote and when you wrote it.

The first product is the Legal Safeguarding Agent (LSA). The LSA is a small software agent that sits on your desktop. You can direct the agent to examine specific folders and/or file types on a regular basis. When it does, the agent will determine if files are new or have been changed since the last execution. If so, it will create an archive copy of the file along with a digital fingerprint and date-stamp. The fingerprint and date-stamp (not the document itself) are automatically sent to IP.com for registration and publication. The document and the archive of the document all remain on the users desktop. This provides maximum privacy as your documents never leave your possession. It also provides the best real-world solution to writers who create work on a regular basis, and who might change, edit or revise that work on a frequent basis. The agent can also be run manually to protect specific versions of work that you might be sending out to editors or reviewers. If the archive option is turned on, it also ceates a version control-like mechanism that ensures you have multiple versions of your work saved without renaming the work each time (the agent takes care of that foryou as it creates the archive).

The second product is the Creative Registry. The Creative Registry is an online database which allows the user to upload documents for safeguarding and safekeeping. Users can log on to the IP.com Creative Registry and upload individual documents to the Registry. When they do, they are provided a Certificate of Authenticity (CoA) which includes the document fingerprint and upload date information. The user can then use the CoA to retrieve the document in the future in order to prove the authenticity of their work. Alternatively, they can use their original document to prove their work by simply re-fingerprinting that document for a legal authority. When the document reproduces the same fingerprint (which it will if it has not been changed) as registered with IP.com they will have demonstrated the original date of their work and the fact that the content has not been changed (IP.com will freely confirm the registration information for any fingerprint. i.e. the date it was recorded by IP.com, via our website) Both of the above solutions ensure that you can prove what you wrote (or created) and when, thus ensuring that you will be able to establish when your copyright protection for a specific piece of work went into effect.

The Legal Safeguarding Agent is therefore a better solution for regular use where the volume of documents or records protected could be relatively high and storing the records on the user machine is desirable or at least not a problem (do you back up your work?). The Creative Registry is a better solution for low volume work or where the user wants to have the document stored by a trusted third party.

Both solutions help you prove the date and content of your work, irrefutably. Both solutions help ensure you can enjoy the protection of US copyright laws without the authenticity of your work being questioned.

Protecting your “work in progress” is an excellent idea and allows you to send it to others for comment, review or consideration, without fear that somehow they will steal your work and present it as their own. Using IP.com legal safeguarding solutions, you will always be able to prove that you had the work prior to the time it was shared. And when it comes time to publish or sell your work, or otherwise memorialize it in a final way, you can always register the final work with the Library of Congress.
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Flash! You've just lost some IP

Posted on February 29, 2008 by Tom Petrocelli
It seems like every other day we hear about another company losing important data. Just recently (Thursday, January 17, 2008), Iron Mountain announced that they lost a tape with personal information on over 650,000 people on it. Please don't think I'm picking on Iron Mountain. This type of data loss happen regularly. What we hear about in the news are the situations where financial or private information is lost. What we don't hear about is lost or misplaced intellectual property. Companies keep this quiet since it is an embarrassing internal matter that they don't have to broadcast.

Yet IP data loss happens all the time. Flash drives and flash memory provide high capacity storage at a cheap price. Portable USB hard drives of up to 500GB are now available for very little money. This is big enough to house large corporate databases and as easy to lose as a cell phone. Which brings us to personal digital devices like cell phones and music players. These have substantial amounts of storage which often contain more than just someone's tunes or pictures of their cat.

All of this mobile storage creates an enormous IP problem. Most people don't realize that practically anything can be intellectual property. The end result is that almost everyone is, at some point, walking around with large amounts of intellectual property in an easy-to-lose form. Mobile storage also makes it very easy for folks to go over to the dark side and take intellectual property. It's now all too simple to copy large amounts of information and very hard to track when it happens.

The good news is that the only one who gets hurt if you lose your intellectual property is you (and your shareholders). If someone loses 150,000 Social Security numbers then there are 150,000 people at risk outside your company. The bad news is that you lose big. A simple "flash drive accident" may hand your competitor your most trusted secrets, jeopardizing new products, revenue, and reputation.

As bad as the bad is, it can be mitigated. First, make sure that you have copies of everything that might contain intellectual property in a secure location. This way, if you have to prove prior art, you can do so. If you need to prove that the information was taken(misappropriated), rather than accidentally lost,  you can do that too. Second, continuously monitor the landscape to see if anything is leaking. Many folks only survey the intellectual property space when they are applying for a patent. While there are a dozen reasons to do this, finding where your intellectual property is turning up is one of them. Finally, review important information for intellectual property on a regular basis. Not everything is important but you won't know that until you review it. This way everyone will have a better appreciation of what needs to be locked down and can't ever be copied to mobile storage or devices.

This is where IP.com can help. Our InnovationQ, Prior Art Database, and Patent Search Services can, when taken together, help secure your intellectual property, assist in making decisions about what is or is not IP,  and provide you the business intelligence you need when surveying the IP landscape.

Otherwise you might wake up one day and find your that your IP has sprouted legs and walked off.
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Legal Safeguarding Agent - process overview

Posted on October 11, 2007 by Sam Baxter
As more and more work is captured in electronic form, it is imperative to maintain those records appropriately from the moment they are created. Electronic files can be made more secure than their paper based counterparts through the use of state of the art cryptographic routines of fingerprinting and publishing. The IP.com Legal Safeguarding Agent removes the complexity of generating, storing, publishing and managing these fingerprints by making the functionality available in an easy-to-use stand-alone agent.

Additionally, the publishing of fingerprints through IP.com’s Prior Art Database provides unbiased third-party corroboration as well as defensible date-stamping.

IP.com legal safeguarding allows you to transparently protect your files so that you can concentrate on your business with complete confidence in the reliability and defensibility of your electronic records.

Securing your file

1. The Legal Safeguarding Agent (LSA) software runs at a user selected, predetermined
interval looking for new files to safeguard.

OR

The Legal Safeguarding Agent (LSA) software is invoked from within your own
software application using our developers API kit. The agent can be configured
to include (or ignore) only the files matching your specifications (outlined in the
next section).

2. Fingerprints are generated for newly discovered files by the LSA local software application.

3. The LSA application contacts the servers at IP.com and transmits the fingerprint information.

4. The remote IP.com server creates a new document called a BCR (Bulk Certification Record) which contains all of the transmitted fingerprints for the current session.

5. The server generates a fingerprint for the contents of the BCR to further ensure integrity. The BCR and fingerprint are saved to the IP.com Prior Art Database.

6. The server responds to the LSA application running on your network with the BCR number. The software can store the information in a file, or in a local database.

7. Publishing – once all the of the above steps are complete the certification record for the BCR is published into the IP.com Prior Art Database as well as a hard copy in The IP.com Journal. This is a critical step in ensuring the public integrity of your records.

Authenticating a file

1. A new fingerprint is generated for a file using the LSA software

2. The generated fingerprint can be searched within the IP.com Prior Art Database. The search will return any matching documents – the date of the earliest document in the search result will indicate the earliest date that a file matching that signature was recorded.

OR

The BCR from the original safeguarding session can be searched within the Prior Art Database. That document will contain all the fingerprints from that session.vThe newly generated fingerprint can be compared to the list of fingerprints stored during that session.

How is the integrity of the BCR documents ensured?

The BCR documents, which contain the individual fingerprints of files processed over the course of a given day, are published in an aggregated document to the IP.com Prior Art Database. Each document published to the IP.com Prior Art Database receives two notarizations, one from IP.com in the form of an IPCOM sequential number and date, and the second from Surety. It also appears in The IP.com Journal – the monthly printed publication containing the previous month's Prior Art Database submissions. The IP.com Journal is indexed by a number of libraries worldwide, including the Library of Congress. Continue Reading...
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Fingerprints - the key to Legal Safeguarding

Posted on October 10, 2007 by Sam Baxter
Every file on a computer is stored as a sequence of data ‘bits’. These bits form a chain of numeric data that is easily handled by the computer. These data bits act much like the atoms that build physical matter, individually they are ordinary, but when arranged in a specific order they build complex and unique things. Electronic fingerprinting works by performing a series of complex mathematical operations on the data bits in your file to form a unique profile of the data contained within (i.e. the document fingerprint). Each file is processed by the fingerprinting function (sometimes known as a hash algorithm, or message digest function) to produce a new string of data that contains the results of the mathematical operations on the original file.

Fingerprints are generated using a hash algorithm that produces signatures of a certain complexity (bit depth) which correlates to the number of possible combinations that can be represented by the fingerprint - the higher the complexity, the lower the possibility that a duplicate fingerprint could occur for different files. Two of the common fingerprint functions, MD5 and SHA-1 use 128-bit and 160-bit lengths respectively. This means that MD5 can have over 340,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 different values without repeating. SHA-1 can hold over 4 billion times as many as MD5. The Legal Safeguarding Agent produces 288-bit fingerprints - by combining a MD5 and SHA-1 fingerprint; yielding 2^288 (or 4.97x10^86) possible combinations. This yields a staggering number of possible combinations; imagine the number 497 followed by 84 zeroes. Using this method, if you were to generate 100 trillion fingerprints every second, it would take 1.57x10^65 years to exhaust the possible supply of fingerprints. (157,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years)

Like their real-world counterparts, electronic fingerprints cannot be used to re-generate the file or person which produced them. Both the MD5 and SHA-1 hash algorithms are considered to be “one way” algorithms, meaning that the mathematical functions to produce the fingerprint work for creating the fingerprint, but cannot be done “in reverse” to re-create the original. This is important, as it means that fingerprints can be transmitted, stored, and viewed by the public without compromising any of your sensitive data.

How are fingerprints used to authenticate files?

Since the fingerprinting function works on each individual bit of the original electronic file, even the slightest change produces a new fingerprint. It is because of this, that fingerprints can be used as a tool of file integrity; by comparing a known fingerprint value for a file to a newly generated fingerprint for that file it is easy to see if the file has remained unchanged. The important component to this process is in having a trusted registry of fingerprint information.

IP.com offers legal safeguarding in all of its products, and specifically created the IP.com Legal Safeguarding Agent to provide this function on a single document basis, or in an integrated way to existing document management solutions. The safeguarding agent ensures the integrity of the document at multiple levels, including the last and important step of publishing the certification record (fingerprint/date-stamp) into the public domain.

The next blog post in this series provides an overview of the IP.com legal safeguarding process and how the IP.com Legal Safeguarding Agent works.
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Managing Risk with Legal Safeguarding Agent

Posted on October 9, 2007 by Sam Baxter
Electronic Record Integrity - a simple phrase that continues to become more significant in today’s business world. Every organization has critical business records, including research and development, financial, compliance records for HIPAA and Sarbanes- Oxley, as well as their own control documents used to manage customers, manufacturing processes and other sensitive areas. These records are only as good as the company’s ability to prove their integrity; that they existed with specific content at a specific point in time.

Electronic records have many advantages over paper. Unfortunately, these same advantages also expose records to tampering and fraud as we’ve seen witnessed in recent news stories. The lack of ability to prove the integrity of electronic records (who created what and when) complicates efforts in the event of a legal challenge. That is why IP.com created the legal safeguarding process.

Using electronic files doesn’t mean that you have to lose all assurances of the integrity of your work. Electronic documents can be made more secure than their paper-based counterparts through the use of legal safeguarding. Legal safeguarding is the process of fingerprinting and date-stamping electronic records so that the content and date of the document can be proven with accuracy at any future date.
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Can your e-records be authenticated if need be during litigation?

Posted on October 4, 2007 by Thomas J. Colson
The discovery that Hwang Woo-suk falsified research data shocked the science world and disgraced his native South Korea. It is alleged that he forged DNA tests to support his claim that he cloned stem cells. How could this happen?

Well…easily. To some degree, this sort of thing probably happens all the time. At least some of the records he falsified were images. These days, images are typically stored in an electronic format. Moreover, most documents are stored electronically as well; invention disclosures, lab notebook records and clinical trial data just to name a few. More and more evidentiary material is kept electronically and less and less is kept on paper. And you know what that means. Easy to alter. Easy to fraudulently alter.

The rate of incidents regarding falsification of research data, financial data, and all kinds of other records seems to be growing. Or maybe it’s just the discovery of the fraud that is growing. But whichever it is, the press around these incidents is ramping up the concerns we all have about the authenticity of electronic records. Lawyers, juries, and courts are all becoming savvier to this opportunity for fraud. Documents submitted as evidence are being more aggressively cross examined as to their authenticity. Continue Reading...
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