Before you even start manufacturing, you find out your invention would be infringing on another patent. Your freedom-to-operate search revealed a competitor holds a patent on a core component. Now what? Don’t Panic. Redesign!
The post A Legal Workaround to Patent Infringement: Design, Don’t Destroy appeared first on King Patent Law.
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Here’s the true cost of manufacturing your invention overseas. The minute you send your blueprints to a manufacturer, you introduce a massive risk of intellectual property theft.
The post The Petrifying Patent Problems With Overseas Manufacturing: Securing Your Idea at the Factory appeared first on King Patent Law.
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Let’s look at the Two Scariest Patent Searches! An inventor should run two different types of patent searches, a patentability search and a freedom-to-operate search, and mixing them up is a huge mistake that can cost millions.
The post Freedom-to-Operate Patent Searches: Avoiding the Specter of Infringement appeared first on King Patent Law.
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Welcome, innovators, to a critical lesson that separates successful patent entrepreneurs from those whose patents collect dust. I’m Julie King, and today I’m revealing the terrifying truth that owning a patent does not automatically give you the right to sell your invention.
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Be careful not to let your trade secrets die with you, or you may accidentally kill your business. If you have a proprietary formula, customer list, or algorithm that gives you your competitive edge, it’s not registered with the government. Its protection relies entirely on secrecy and contracts.
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Fatal mistakes are often made when people unfamiliar with patent and trademark law leave that kind of intellectual property to people in their will or when they inherit it.
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The patent clock keeps ticking after you die! A utility patent is a time-sensitive asset. If you own the patent rights to your invention, you must make sure it’s managed properly after your death. Even if your heirs successfully inherit the patent, if they don’t know how to manage it, the rights may die a premature death.
The post The Patent and the Pendulum: Heirs Who Can’t or Won’t Keep it Alive appeared first on King Patent Law.
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Not having provisions about control of your business’ intellectual property in your business operating documents is a grave mistake in intellectual property protection.
When one of the owners of a business dies, their ownership share is handled by their estate planning documents and the business’ operating documents, such as an LLC’s operating agreement or a corporation’s bylaws and shareholder agreement.
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This copyright jump scare is the termination provision in the 1976 Copyright Act that allows creators who transferred their copyright rights to someone else to reclaim those rights, even if they were assigned permanently. This is how Friday the 13th screenwriter Victor Miller successfully reclaimed his rights to the original script! I talked more about that in an episode a couple of years ago.
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What’s the intellectual property horror lurking in the closet that gets overlooked the most? We’ve talked about how patents, trademarks, and trade dress are all massive business assets. But too often, people spend a good deal of time and money protecting those assets, but then they leave their future value to chance.
The post The Grave Truth: Protecting Your Intellectual Property from the Grim Reaper appeared first on King Patent Law.
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The most powerful strategy for protecting the design of a physical product is the dual protection of a design patent and trade dress.
The post Two Heads Are Better Than One! The IP Synergy of Design Patents and Trade Dress Trademarks appeared first on King Patent Law.
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Both design patents and trade dress have one unfortunate thing in common: functionality of the design can be a killer.
You cannot protect a design feature if it is essential to the product’s use or purpose.
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Trade Dress is a type of trademark that protects the overall look and feel of a product or its packaging. It’s the brand’s persistent visual identity.
The post The Shape That Never Dies: Trade Dress Trademark Immortality appeared first on King Patent Law.
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