While watching Shark Tank Season Five, Episode 10, I was reminded of the importance of filing for both a design and utility patent. The show aired a young family looking to gain financial backing to expand their growing lunchbox business. The couple started Yubo, an environmentally friendly customized lunchbox company. The beauty of their design […]
Widerman Malek Law Blog
Inventorship and Fraud
Inventor and Fraud
If an inventor is under an obligation to assign the rights to an invention to a company, it would be fraud to try to file the application in the name of another. Engaging in such fraud can open up (and tip over) a can of worms for the inventor that may not be easily cleaned up.
Case Brief: CLS Bank v. Alice (Round 5)
In a dissent from the court opinion filed in CLS Bank v. Alice Corp, Federal Circuit Judges Linn and O’Malley unceremoniously burst the bubble of several Amici who urged the court to use this case to undermine software patents. In the process, the authors school their colleagues on the dangers of two judicial sirens: extra-record fact finding and legislating from the bench.
Case Brief: CLS Bank v. Alice (Round 4)
Another day, another case brief of an opinion filed in CLS Bank v. Alice Corp. Today’s fare is the concurrence-in-part and dissent-in-part authored by Federal Circuit Judge Newman, who takes the “Memory Lane” award for citing precedent from 1958, … and 1939, … and 1813. Did you know that “patent” is derived from the latin […]
The Effect Of Listing An Improper Inventor On A Patent Application
The Effect Of Listing An Improper Inventor On A Patent Application
An inventor is someone that has had some sort of input into a claim that is listed in a patent application. If an improper inventor is listed on a patent application, then the patent that may eventually issue may be invalidated. This is also the case when not all of the inventors are listed on the patent application.
Case Brief: CLS Bank v. Alice
Nothing conjures memories of law school like writing a case brief (with the possible exception of an emergency root canal). Nonetheless, the judicial bar fight that is the Federal Circuit en banc decision in CLS Bank v. Alice Corp inspires me to dust off my case briefing skills, starting with Judge Lourie’s plurality concurrence as joined by Judges Dyk, […]
Who Is An Inventor In A Patent Application?
It is important for a patent application to list the proper inventors. An inventor is not just someone that you want to put on a patent application, but must be someone that contributed in some way to at least one claim in the patent application.
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 […]
