We had a little fun on the Intertubes the other night, creating a search story introducing the new free Global Patent Search Engine that IP.com recently launched including Chinese patent data, in addition to the Prior Art Database, Creative Registry, InnovationQ, and other innovation management services available at IP.com. Hope you enjoy the show.
A Copyright Refresher on the website of the USPTO provides this guidance:
What is copyright?
Copyright is a form of protection provided by U.S. law to the authors of "original works of authorship" fixed in any tangible medium of expression. The manner and medium of fixation are virtually unlimited. Creative expression may be captured in words, numbers, notes, sounds, pictures, or any other graphic or symbolic media. The subject matter of copyright is extremely broad, including literary, dramatic, musical, artistic, audiovisual, and architectural works. Copyright protection is available to both published and unpublished works.
Under the 1976 Copyright Act, the copyright owner has the exclusive right to reproduce, adapt, distribute, publicly perform, and publicly display the work. In the case of sound recordings, the copyright has the right to perform the work publicly by means of a digital audio transmission. These exclusive rights are freely transferable, and may be licensed, sold, donated to charity, or bequeathed to your heirs. It is illegal for anyone to violate any of the exclusive rights of the copyright owner. If the copyright owner prevails in an infringement claim, the available remedies include preliminary and permanent injunctions (court orders to stop current or prevent future infringements), impounding, and destroying the infringing articles.
The exclusive rights of the copyright owner, however, are limited in a number of important ways. Under the "fair use" doctrine, which has long been part of U.S. copyright law and was expressly incorporated in the 1976 Copyright Act, a judge may excuse unauthorized uses that may otherwise be infringing. Section 107 of the Copyright Act lists criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research as examples of uses that may be eligible for the fair use defense. In other instances, the limitation takes the form of a "compulsory license" under which certain limited uses of copyrighted works are permitted upon payment of specified royalties and compliance with statutory conditions. The Copyright Act also contains a number of statutory limitations covering specific uses for educational, religious, and charitable purposes
How can I secure a copyright?
This is a frequently misunderstood topic because many people believe that you must register your work before you can claim copyright. However, no publication, registration or other action in the Copyright Office is required to secure copyright. Copyright is secured automatically when the work is created, and a work is "created" when it is fixed in a “copy or a phonorecord for the first time.” For example, a song can be fixed in sheet music or on a CD, or both. Although registration with the Copyright Office is not required to secure protection, it is highly recommended for the following reasons:
Registration establishes a public record of the copyright claim.
Registration is necessary before an infringement suit may be filed in court (for works of U. S. origin).
If made before or within 5 years of publication, registration establishes prima facie evidence in court of the validity of the copyright and of the facts stated in the certificate.
If registration is made within 3 months after publication of the work or prior to an infringement of the work, statutory damages and attorney's fees will be available to the copyright owner in court actions. Otherwise, only an award of actual damages and profits is available to the copyright owner.
Registration allows the owner of the copyright to record the registration with the U. S. Customs Service for protection against the importation of infringing copies.
What Creative Registry Can do for You
The IP.com Creative Registry is a web-based registry that allows you to upload or retrieve your documents and creative work for legal safeguarding.
This private document archive digitally fingerprints and date-stamps your work, then stores it for your personal access.
How it works
Securely upload your documents and creative work for legal safeguarding.Learn more about IP.com and how you can legally safeguard and protect your creative works as soon as possible, often while the creative is still a work in progress, and without having to publicly disclose the content by registering a copyright.
If you have an invention or idea, it is essential that you protect it or run the risk of losing your rights and any future rewards. Here is what you need to do:Now, that's all well and good, if you think you're "protecting your invention" by papering your relatives, friends and co-workers with non-disclosure agreements, to set up a cause of action in contract law for breach of that agreement if those people closest to you somehow disclose that which they have agreed specifically not to disclose, and you can prove those facts in court. Good luck getting "your future rewards" that way.
First, start a diary/journal in a bound notebook. Include the date of the invention (when the idea was initially conceived) and a description. This is important in connection with filing for a patent in the future as the United States is a ''First-to-Invent'' country. Keep the journal updated as you develop prototypes, make modifications, etc.
Second, prepare a one-page nondisclosure agreement. If you want to tell anyone (relatives, friends, plant personnel, others), the receiver of the information should sign the agreement and keep the invention confidential. This way, you keep your idea protected and have a record of when and to whom the information was disclosed.
The IP.com Creative Registry is a web-based registry that allows you to upload your documents and creative work for legal safeguarding. IP.com digitally fingerprints and date-stamps your work while placing it into a private archive for your personal access. IP.com then publishes the fingerprint and date into the public domain as a testament to the existence of your work. Your actual document is NEVER exposed to anyone else, yet you have irrefutable proof of its content at the precise time it was safeguarded!When your invention is defined sufficiently that you'd like to ensure that USPTO examiners discover your "prior art" when examining any application for a patent that should not be granted to anyone else because of the disclosure of your prior art, you may want to publish a technical disclosure of the invention in the Prior Art Database, which is searched by the USPTO examiners and many other patent agencies around the world as part of the patent review process. Defensive publishing is a widely-used tactic as an alternative to the expensive patent application process, which an inventor should consider as part of a comprehensive innovation management strategy with the advice of a patent attorney retained to consider the law and facts of specific cases.
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Links on a variety of IP issues (Archives)
"Although Google, Google Patents and the USPTO’s electronic databases are commonly declared favorite research tools by patent researchers throughout the world, an important niche of knowledge is imperative not to forget: the world of non-digitized information. This week, the Top 5 Unexpected Places to Find Prior Art have been gathered from the best and brightest AOP Study Submissions – from non-digitized favorites like old manuals, to the interesting world of looking for prior art in non-related industries." Great article by Article One Partners at the link above
"When most people talk about the dot-com boom and bust they talk about the money that was made and lost in the process. What they don’t talk about so much is the innovation that created completely new and world changing technologies. From my perspective the money is interesting but the real conversation needs to be about the rate at which a new technology is adopted, the speed with which new companies are gaining market share and the disruptions that are happening as new technologies and companies supplant the prior generation’s most popular products," writes Ben Keighran, CEO & Co-Founder of Chomp, a search engine for mobile apps.
Predicting the future of the Internet is easy: anything it hasn’t yet dramatically transformed, it will. People, companies, investors and even countries can’t stop this transformation. The only choice you have is whether you join the side of innovation and progress or you don’t.
MIT calculates that its living alumni have founded 25,800 companies that currently provide 3.3m jobs for people around the world. These firms have combined annual revenues of some $2.2 trillion.
George Will, conservative icon, wrote an Op-Ed piece in The Washington Post last week extolling the virtues (and the necessities) of innovation and government support for it ("Rev the scientific engine"). Kevin Noonan at Patent Docs reviews the piece in a blog post at the link in the blue headline above.
eMarketer estimates that, even with the hype around newer social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, nearly two in five US companies will maintain a public-facing blog this year for marketing purposes. This usage is on the rise as firms will increasingly realize the value of the blogosphere to further a variety of corporate functions, such as communications, lead generation, customer service and brand marketing.
IBM, Nokia, Sony, and Pitney Bowes teamed up with the World Business Council for Sustainable Development to create the Eco-Patent Commons, an organized effort to make freely available patents that "reduce waste, pollution, global warming, and energy demands." The Commons allows global businesses to share environmental innovations, turning the patent-long the emblem of all that is the opposite of sharing-into a vehicle for collective innovation.
Facebook’s new community pages have created a lot of confusion for businesses. Many companies have been surprised (and many angry) to find their brands showing up in community pages that are fully outside of their control.
Both Google and Bing have added many social search features over the past year. There’s also been talk about using “social signals” to help rank regular search results. For more information, read Danny Sullivan's blog post on Search Engine Land at the blue link above.
With the red-hot acquisition dance between Google and Groupon sucking up all the attention, it’s easy once again to ignore the No. 2 player in the fast-growing social buying space–LivingSocial. Read Kara Swisher's article in Boomtown, a columns in the Wall Street Journal's Digital Network. With Walt Mossberg, she co-produces and co-hosts D: All Things Digital, a major high-tech and media conference.
As noted in the link above, according to a report from Reuters, the court ruled that IPCom’s amended patent, which protects technology that connect phones to networks, was valid. [Readers of IP.com's blog, Securing Innovation, will recall that, since the commencement of this patent dispute years ago, we have made it clear that IP.com is in no way related to IPCom GmbH KG, a company in Germany that is involved in patent litigation reportedly involving 17 billions of Euros in claims. [For the latest news about IPCom GmbH, including our clarification to avoid confusion with IP.com, just search Google for IPCom GmbH.]
The articles published today and in coming days are based on thousands of United States embassy cables, the daily reports from the field intended for the eyes of senior policy makers in Washington...As daunting as it is to publish such material over official objections, it would be presumptuous to conclude that Americans have no right to know what is being done in their name.
America’s biggest corporations have dramatically increased their participation in Twitter, according to “The Fortune 500 and Social Media,” a yearly report from the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.
Infamous “balloon boy” hoaxer Richard Heene is at it again, hitting America right where it itches. The determined dad is trying to raise scratch for his wife and three sons by hawking his own “Bear Scratch” itching post in a YouTube commercial that makes him come across as an even more excitable version of late, leather-lunged pitchman Billy Mays.
The National Archives is home to some of the nation’s most prized historical documents. But a new audit by the Government Accountability Office has found that it’s not doing a good job of keeping track of them. The audit was prompted in part by the loss of the Wright Brothers’ original patent for the flying machine. It was last seen in 1980 after being passed around multiple Archives offices, the Patents and Trademarks Office and the National Air and Space Museum. Maps for the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were also checked out by military representatives in 1962, and haven't been seen since.
Links to Prior Art (Archives)
Methods, systems, and computer program products for disabling a mobile phone suspected of being a trigger for a bomb are provided.
Deciding whether to contact a particular friend, classmate, or coworker often hinges on where the person is located and what that person is doing. Such a decision typically has to be made in a limited amount of time with a limited amount of information. Further, when a person arrives at a particular location, such as a park or shopping mall, they often want to know if someone else they know is also at the same location. There is thus a need for systems and methods for automatically locating web-based social network members. The present invention relates generally to web-based social networks, and more particularly to systems and methods for automatically locating web-based social network members, is the subject of a patent recently obtained by Facebook.
This patent, assigned to Apple, relates to text-based communication devices. The proliferation of computers and compact portable devices has led to vast amounts of text-based communication. One problem with text-based communications is that there is no way to monitor and control text communications to make them user appropriate. For example, users such as children may send or receive messages (intentionally or not) with parentally objectionable language.
The present invention relates to a method of production of graphene, notably employing a stage of annealing under irradiation.Graphene is a two-dimensional crystal in the form of a sheet of carbon, in which the atoms are positioned following a regular order of hexagonal structure, the thickness of this sheet corresponding to that of a carbon atom, thus corresponding to a thickness of less than a nanometre.
A UAV is a remotely piloted or self-piloted aircraft that can carry cameras, sensors, communications equipment, or other payloads, is capable of controlled, sustained, level flight, and is usually powered by an engine. A self-piloted UAV may fly autonomously based on pre-programmed flight plans. UAVs are becoming increasingly used for various missions where manned flight vehicles are not appropriate or not feasible. These missions may include military situations, such as surveillance, reconnaissance, target acquisition, data acquisition, communications relay, decoy, harassment, or supply flights. UAVs are also used for a growing number of civilian missions where a human observer would be at risk, such as firefighting, natural disaster reconnaissance, police observation of civil disturbances or crime scenes, and scientific research. An example of the latter would be observation of weather formations or of a volcano. As miniaturization technology has improved, it is now possible to manufacture very small UAVs (sometimes referred to as micro-aerial vehicles, or MAVs).
A fuel cell system comprises a fuel cell, a reactant gas pipe for supplying a reactant gas to the fuel cell, and an injector for controlling the state of the gas on the upstream side in the reactant gas pipe and supplying the reactant gas to the downstream side by driving a valve element with an electromagnetic drive force at a predetermined drive cycle to separate the valve element from a valve seat. The injector is provided integrally in the fuel cell, and hence the vibration and noise of the injector can be absorbed and suppressed by the fuel cell as a heavy article. -- US Application Publication (Source: USPTO) Publication No. US 2010/0209797 A1 published on 19-Aug-2010
A system for deploying a cover over an oil spill, to collect the spilled oil, uses a plurality of gas propelled rockets are attached to lines arranged around the periphery of the cover. Outward projection of the rockets spreads the cover, the weight of the expended rockets then pulling the edges of the cover below the water surface to trap the covered oil.
A weather-based financial index is based at least in part on weather. The index may take into account any of a variety of weather factors, such as temperature, precipitation, humidity, number of sunny or overcast days in a period of time, number of freeze days in a period of time, etc. Weather factor value(s) are combined with one or more financial components to provide the weather-based financial index. The index may be traded on an exchange, such as the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX).
A method and apparatus for testing a blowout preventer (BOP) wherein a pressurization unit applies fluid to an isolated portion of the throughbore of the BOP.
This idea is to enable the silent operating engines/vehicles to broadcast signal over a specific frequency within a short distance where a receiver can detect the signal and produce appropriate alert signals.
The Self-Sustaining Electric Engine Enhancement (SSEEE) specification modifies the process by which electric car engines consume and replenish electric power and dramatically extends the distance a car can travel before the need for pit stops to recharge the energy source, i.e., batteries, fuel cells, etc.
The present invention relates to an oil spill identification system and oil spill identification sensors to be used in connection with this system. The system is used primarily on fixed offshore structures, but may also be used on fixed onshore constructions.
http://ip.com/patent/US7009550
A shark-repelling surfboard or flotation board made of polymer foam with coating. The surfboard or the flotation board has a locator device for locating large aquatic animals, and an alarm device for alerting a rider of large aquatic animals, such as sharks, located by the locator device.
http://ip.com/patent/US7731554
