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, [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]
...saving money until you are ready. Sometimes a topic is important enough to revisit after a few years. This one reexamines the frequent question of how to “extend” a provisional patent application beyond its natural 12-month life. My readers all know that the smart start for a small inventor or a new company with an invention to protect is a Provisional patent [...]
And the Key Signs that Indicate When You Do I love to give advice, especially when I know my prediction will never be wrong. My favorite advice is to predict a 50-50 chance of success. Because no matter the outcome, I’m never wrong. My other favorite is recommending a patentability search. Because no matter the results, my client is happy. If we get “good” [...]
When Foreign Patent Protection Makes Sense for Firearms Inventions (The answer is “Probably not, unless…”) As an inventor myself, I know the enthusiastic feeling that your invention is going to be an incredible success, and wouldn’t it be a tragedy if you had only the US market protected and the rest of the world was knocking off your invention willy-nilly without [...]
