By: Mark R. Malek This concludes the series of articles that I have been writing on entity status in the United States Patent Office. The first article introduced the new micro-entity status. The next article gave some background information on what would happen if you claimed the wrong entity status before the USPTO, and the latest […]
By: Mark R. Malek As you may recall, my last couple of articles have been about the different statuses that an inventor can claim when paying fees to the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). The first of these series of articles was an introduction to the micro-entity status, which allows inventors that qualify as […]
By: Mark R. Malek In my last article, I outlined the new filing status in the Patent Office that can save inventors even more money in the patent process – that of the micro-entity. As you may recall from that article, when filing a patent application (and throughout the patent prosecution process), you must pay […]
By: Mark R. Malek As many of you may know, the United States Patent System recently went through a little transformation on March 15, 2013. The biggest and most public of these transformations was the transition from a first to invent system to a first to file system (more on that later). One thing that […]
By: Mark R. Malek You may recall that my last article was directed to the requirement to pay maintenance fees in order to keep your patent alive. As was discussed in that article, maintenance fees must be paid at 3.5 years, 7.5 years and 11.5 years after the patent has issued. When someone has not paid […]
By: Mark R. Malek In my previous article, I indicated that a patent is important to protect the rights of innovators and to encourage them to continue to innovate. This is done by providing a patent holder with an exclusive right to exclude others from making, using, selling, or offering to sell the invention that is […]
By: Mark R. Malek Patent rights are derived from the U.S. Constitution. Many people mistakenly call patents rights a monopoly, but that is not exactly accurate. I will be posting a follow up article on this one that explains precisely why patents are not monopolies, and why it drives me completely nuts when people call them […]
By: Mark R. Malek I am sure everyone has starved themselves to the point of near collapse in anticipation of the Thanksgiving Holiday Weekend. For the sake of showing that the Patent world is very in touch with the holiday season, we would like to share with you some Thanksgiving related patents that we came […]
By: Mark R. Malek My previous articles (see them here, here and here) have provided information on the requirements of disclosing prior art and about how to do some prior art searching. Many times, I am asked by a client to provide them a “complete” patent search that locates every piece of related prior art […]
