Brad Myers' Recent IP Lecture

Hi everyone,

I attended professor Brad Myers' lecture on intellectual property last week and thought you might be interested in some of the basic information he provided about IP and more specifically patents. If you have been wondering how the system works, or perhaps how to protect your own work from competition, professor Myers' points may be useful.

Myers distinguishes between four kinds of intellectual property: copyrights, trademarks, trade secrets, and patents:

1. A copyright provides exclusive rights to an exact, original expression for a limited time. They are assigned freely and automatically for all works, can be registered, and apply to books, code, icons, and things with form and substance--not ideas or information.
2. Trademarks identify a commercial product to avoid confusion. They never expire and can be used for words, icons, or even colors. TM, (R), and SM are varieties of trademark.
3. Trade secrets need not be disclosed (of course) until a patent is issued. These may include plans, marketing analyses, and algorithms. If it's covered by a non disclosure agreement, it probably has something to do with trade secrets.
4. A patent provides exclusive rights to an invention for a limited time--in the US, 20 years from issue. Internationally, patents are reviewed and issued based on a "first to file" rule. The US used to be "first to invent," but the recent America Invents Act erased that and instituted the same policy followed by the rest of the world. Patents often cost more to acquire than the profit they wind up making. It can cost $20,000 or more to patent an invention domestically, and possibly as much as $100,000 for international patents. Patents must be "novel and nonobvious to a relevant tradesperson," "useful," and "properly disclosed for possible reproduction." (See http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/data/constitution/article01/39.html) There are provisional patents one can get through an academic institution, which cost a mere $125, but this may not apply for the purposes of our class.

An overarching point of the talk was that patents are highly competitive and constantly challenged by federal courts, the International Trade Commission, and frequent reexaminations by patent office workers. Open source licensing and creative commons offer alternatives--google CTTEC and nosoftwarepatents.com for more on this.

Best,

Russ