Blog

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 »

HOW YOU CAN HELP ELON MUSK SAVE THE GUN INDUSTRY

It’s appalling when the President of the United States finally says out loud what we know Democrats have long been thinking about our rights and our industry: “The idea we still allow semi-automatic weapons to be purchased is sick. It has no socially redeeming value, not a single solitary rationale for it except profit for the gun manufacturers.” -President Joe Biden, November 24, 2022 Contrast that to an old-school Democrat running for President in 1960, who said the following and was never criticized for it, even as he was running successfully for Vice  [...]

By Ben Langlotz | December 7, 2022 | Firearms, Opinion Pieces | 0 Comments Read More »