Patent

Test Marketing Your Invention

The Invent Blog linked to an article from the Wall Street Journal entitled Testing the Marketability Of Your Product Idea. The article suggests that you should test market your product or invention by soliciting feedback from (1) friends and family, (2) those who might understand your product’s industry or customers, (3) employees and customers in [...]

Microsoft’s Patent vs. IL Eavesdropping Statute

The PTO recently granted Microsoft patent 7,231,019. It covers a method and system of identifying callers by (1) capturing the acoustic properties of the caller’s voice, (2) creating an acoustic model of the caller’s voice, and (3) comparing that model to stored models of prior callers. It also compares the caller’s words with language models [...]

Product Firms More Likely To Patent Than Service Firms

Business Professor John R. Allison, Economist Abe Dunn, and Law Professor Ronald J. Mann posted their article “Software Patents, Incumbents, and Entry” on SSRN. The article provides data showing that product based firms (e.g. Microsoft) are more likely to seek and obtain software patents than service based firms (e.g. EDS). The article examined the relation [...]

PTO Wants More From Applicants

The New York Times reports that Jon Dudas, director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office, wants changes in the patent law that would require the applicants to conduct a thorough search of prior art, and provide a explanation why the patent being sought represents a significant innovation in the field.

Patenting Software Security Fixes

The Register reports on a company called Intellectual Weapons, which offers to patent fixes for newly discovered security vulnerabilities, weaknesses, or technical flaws in software. Then the company will seek to license the fixes to vendors of the vulnerable products and other security providers. Intellectual Weapons describes their process: You submit vulnerabilities you have discovered, [...]

Consumers Empowered?

A patent targeted by EFF’s patent busting project caught my eye. A company called NeoMedia claims: the general concept of reading an “index” (e.g., UPC number1) off of what it calls a “data carrier” (e.g., consumer product) and crossreferencing that index in a database in order to find the necessary information to look up and [...]