The Legal Blog

The right of publicity is your right to control the commercial use of your name, image, voice, likeness and other distinctive personal attributes. Yes, your personality, including your gestures and phrases are protected.

Thought for Today: Intellectual property protection is much like protecting yourself from catching COVID-19. [Statistic]  About 10% of the world’s population has been infected with COVID-19. As I sit here in my bed feeling quite sick,  my mind turns to statistics.   I may now be part of that statistic. But wait a minute:  my COVID-19 […]

As an inventor, your patent filing strategy determines whether to file a provisional or non-provisional patent application.

I love my job, in fact,  working with inventors to protect their amazing ideas is so rewarding.  When inventors come to me for patent protection, documentation (or lack of it) makes a huge difference.  This blog post addresses the use and value of invention disclosures for documentation purposes. Invention Disclosures How to memorialize and track […]

(Co-authored with Pranita Dharmadhikari) E-commerce has had remarkable growth in recent years.  In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, businesses are moving online in unprecedented numbers.  Selling online makes it so easy to sell internationally.  Selling internationally necessitates a worldwide patent. Welcome to 2020. Protecting innovative products therefore has become more important than ever.  Many […]

The United States Patent and Trademark Office (“USPTO”) considers the Coronavirus outbreak an “extraordinary situation.”  As a result, the USPTO modified both patent and trademark regulations. “The USPTO stands shoulder-to-shoulder with inventors and entrepreneurs and is working on a variety of measures to incentivize, protect, and disseminate COVID-19 related innovation.” Andrei Iancu Kudos to the […]

A few weeks ago, I published a post about Artificial Intelligence Patent Inventors. This article reported that three patent offices declined patent inventorship to an AI inventor. Recently, a client asked me whether a corporation can be a patent inventor.  Great question.   Just like AI, corporations cannot be patent inventors. Patent Inventors A patent inventor […]

On April 27, 2020 the United States Patent and Trademark Office (“USPTO”)  published a  decision in which it declined to extend patent inventorship to an Artificial Intelligence (“AI”) named DABUS. The decision in general found that the application did not name an “inventor.” Who is DABUS?  DABUS stands for “Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of […]

Everywhere we look we hear of the devastating impact of COVID-19 on health, businesses, social lives, and personal grooming.   On the other side of this devastation is a significant increase in creativity and innovation designed to fight COVID-19.  A glimmer of hope in an otherwise stormy landscape. As reported by the Word Economic Forum: “From […]

COVID-19 and Coronavirus Trademarks “gone viral” Not so long ago, COVID-19 and Coronavirus were not in my vocabulary. How about you? That was then. This is now. In actual fact, the terms COVID-19 and Coronavirus are now everywhere.  Generally speaking, these terms are part of the news, social media, and every conversation. Further, trademark applications […]