Intellectual property rights have been known for years and with this comes the ability to adapt to the new years, the new products and the inventors that make them. However, when the laws are unclear; then something can go wrong for the inventor and the products. This is not generally something that is welcomed with […]
Widerman Malek Law Blog
Who Owns the Invention?
It happens all of the time – an employee that works for you comes up with an amazing invention. Maybe it is an app or it is a piece of software that helps your company grow. Whatever the case may be, it allows you exponential growth. Now the employee decides it is time to move […]
Getting A Refund From The Patent Office If You Are Now A Small Entity
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 […]
Continued Obligation to Monitor Small Entity Status in the Patent Office
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 […]
What Happens If You Claim The Wrong Entity Status In The Patent Office?
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 […]
Patent Office Fees – The Micro Entity
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 […]
A Brief Overview On Patents
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 […]
