Intellectual Property

Intro to IP Law – Part IV – Trade Secrets

Monday, March 2nd, 2009

More from the ideas2money lectures.
Trade Secrets

What do they protect?
Trade secret protection is afforded to confidential information that has actual or potential commercial value by virtue of its secrecy.   Source code, engineering specs, manufacturing tricks, business plans, customer lists… if it’s valuable to you because you keep it known only to yourself and not to your [...]

Intro to IP Law – Part III – Trademarks

Monday, February 23rd, 2009

More from the ideas2money lectures.

Trademarks
What do they protect?
Trademarks protect brand names, logos, taglines, and other marks that
identify the source of goods and services in the marketplace.
How you get them?
Trademark rights begin to accrue just by using the mark in commerce, but
only in the geographic places where the mark is meaningully used.  Federal
trademark registration at the [...]

Intro to IP Law – Part II

Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009

This multi-part series is adapoted from the ideas2money lecture I have been giving for several years, and will in theory serve as the basis of a forthcoming book on the subject.
A bit about basic terminology.  Intellectual Property (IP) refers to two, and possibly three, things.  In the study of programming languages, we would say the [...]

Intro to IP Law – Part I

Tuesday, January 27th, 2009

This multi-part series is adapoted from the ideas2money lecture I have been giving for several years, and will in theory serve as the basis of a forthcoming book on the subject.
In our capitalist economy, company owners generally expect management to seize every lawful opportunity to increase company valuation.  Intellectual Property (IP) law provides many such [...]

Today’s business idea: the expired IP feed

Tuesday, January 13th, 2009

I have searched and I have searched and I cannot find a service that will feed me  notifications of all patents, trademarks, and copyrights as they expire each day, as a veritable heap of them surely must.
When statutory IP rights expire, their subject matter (the patented invention, for example, and the copyrighted song) is all [...]