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 [...]
It's been 10 years since I wrote this. Back then, the biggest change in patent law in my lifetime took effect. And it changed everything. The big change was that patent rights for an invention go to the first to file a patent application, not the first to invent (who has documents showing he invented it first). This means that if you show a new product at SHOT, anyone [...]
...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 [...]
Sometimes, I know when clients have been reading this newsletter. Sometimes, I’m blown away to see something I wrote about years ago drive a client’s strategy. I just took a call from a client who told me they were getting ready to sell their company, and could we see about resurrecting some old trademark registrations they had earlier decided to let drop to save the [...]
