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HOW TO PROTECT “COOL”…

 TWO FAMILIAR WAYS TO PROTECT PRODUCT DESIGNS, PLUS A THIRD WAY YOU’VE NEVER HEARD OF AND CAN UNDOUBTEDLY AFFORD. Everyone wants a patent. It’s perfectly logical to want to protect a new product.  Technical innovations help set you apart in a crowded marketplace and a patent prevents anyone else from offering your innovation for 20 years. But let’s be honest, not every new product has patentable technical innovations.  Sometimes, what makes a successful product isn’t how it works or what it does, but how it looks.  Style sells, and something that looks  [...]

By Ben Langlotz | June 12, 2023 | Books & Resources, Business, Copyright, Firearms, Firearms Industry Advice, How To, Intellectual Property Advice, Legal News, Marketing, Patent, Trademark | 0 Comments Read More »

DON’T MESS WITH TESLA?

How My Crazy Trademark Strategy Revealed Tesla’s Woke Lawyers. I believe in covering your bases, and leaving yourself a backup.  When filing a trademark application for my own business I’ve been known to file two in advance, and let the trademark examiners make my final choice.  That’s how I ended up with “Hybrid” as the brand that conveys my patent-pending InchMetric® hex wrench set with the combined and intermingled metric and fractional element – for when you don’t know or care which format that fastener is – you just want the right size tool without  [...]

By Ben Langlotz | May 5, 2023 | Business, Intellectual Property Advice, Trademark | 0 Comments Read More »

THE APRIL FOOLS’ STUNT I DIDN’T DARE PULL

This one goes back more than a few years, but it’s being resurrected because the issues are timeless, and it’s a little amusing looking back when I was just a bit feistier, at least in print.  Email me if you have a good guess as to what year it first appeared. It was so tempting, but I didn’t dare poke the giant beast, even though I could have gotten away with it, and then illustrated a memorable lesson that’s probably important for most of our readers. It started when I was reading one of the industry’s email news services.  This service starts off with  [...]

By Ben Langlotz | April 12, 2023 | Business, Firearms, Firearms Industry Advice, Intellectual Property Advice, Marketing, Trademark | 0 Comments Read More »

ChatGPT WROTE THIS

Will Artificial Intelligence Replace Me? You Decide… This month, I’m inviting a guest writer to try to do my job. I know lots of law firms have newsletters they outsource to writers who generate the gibberish no one reads. As you can probably tell, I personally write every word of this. Until now. I decided to ask ChatGPT a few questions, and let it do the writing. Here we go: What Are The Most Valuable Firearms Patents? Determining the most valuable firearms patents can be a challenging task, as the value of a patent can be influenced by many factors, including  [...]

By Ben Langlotz | March 9, 2023 | Firearms, Firearms Industry Advice, Patent | 0 Comments Read More »

SHOT Show 2033

What will it look like? Where is everybody? I hadn’t set foot in Las Vegas for three years.  I felt like Rip Van Winkle, but wasn’t quite sure why.  Had Las Vegas changed?  Or was it me?  Last time I had left behind a newborn, and now she bosses me around in paragraphs peppered with words like “actually” and “because.”  A different digit at the start of my age might have made things hit differently, too. The Uber was a Tesla, of course.  The exhaust aroma in the airport parking garage made me wonder whether that too might soon be as distant a  [...]

By Ben Langlotz | February 1, 2023 | Firearms | 0 Comments Read More »

SPEAK SOFTLY, BUT CARRY A BIG PATENT

How a patent shut down a competitor in only 24 hours. Nothing more forcefully drives home a lesson you’ve been teaching for years than when what you’ve been telling others for years happens to you. I’ve been reminding everyone for years that having a patent can provide real competitive benefits, even if you never have to spend a fortune litigating it. I liken it to carrying a pistol for self defense, and probably never having to shoot it – you can usually scare off the muggers just by letting them know you have it and are willing to use it if  [...]

By Ben Langlotz | January 10, 2023 | Firearms, Firearms Industry Advice, Patent | 0 Comments Read More »