Independent Inventors Conference to be hosted by USPTO Nov. 5-6

For all you independent inventors out there who are bummed because you don't get to go to conferences, here's your chance!

The USPTO, along with the National Inventors Hall of Fame, will be hosting the 14th Annual Independent Inventors Conference on November 5th and 6th in Alexandria, VA.

It looks like the conference will be packed with plenty of good information on topics such as patent filing, trademark searching, Patent Cooperation Treaty filings, licensing, and plenty more. Registration is cheap -- $120 -- though lodging in Alexandria can be pretty steep. (At the risk of facing the wrath of the Alexandria Visitor's Bureau, here's a tip: price hotels in the surrounding areas. When I recently attended a conference at the USPTO, I found a room in Washington, D.C. that cost half as much as the cheapest room I could find in Alexandria. As long as you're near a DC Metro, the commute to the USPTO campus is pretty reasonable.)

This conference looks worthwhile if you're an independent inventor and you're interested. In fact, even if you're not that interested in the conference, the USPTO campus is worth a visit.

Follow this link to registration and agenda information via uspto.gov.

Cookbook trademark suit recipe for failure says New York judge

A hat tip to SFPL's resident San Francisco documents/cookbook expert for pointing out the latest culinary intellectual property showdown.

The New York Times reported a couple weeks ago that US Circuit Court judge in New York has thrown out a trademark infringement case brought against Jessica Seinfeld by cookbook author Missy Chase Lapine. Lapine claimed that Seinfeld's recent cookbook, entitled "Deceptively Delicious," was confusingly similar to her own "The Sneaky Chef."

While it's true that both books are about sneaking healthy foods into kids' meals, the judge ruled that there's no likelihood of consumer confusion, which is the primary test for trademark infringement. Judge Laura Taylor Swain's decision can double as a quickie book review for busy parents:

She called Lapine's book ''a dry, rather text-heavy work'' done predominantly in black, gray and shades of brownish-orange. She said Seinfeld's book was ''bright and cheerful, full of different colors and various patterns.'' Consumers who looked at each book were unlikely to be confused, the judge said, tossing out trademark infringement claims.

I wonder which book she liked better? Also, in the interest full disclosure, I'm not aware of the judge actually using any puns in her ruling, including the one from the title of this post.

In all seriousness, though, this story provides a good opportunity to highlight a characteristic about intellectual property that trips many people up: you cannot protect an idea, no matter how good or unique it is. Sure, all intellectual property is rooted in an idea, but the law only provides for the protection of a concrete manifestation of that idea.

Patents don't protect ideas, but rather articles of manufacture or methods for doing something. The article or method has to be expressed in some tangible medium, preferably in a working model. And the protection doesn't work to keep people from using the idea, but rather it keeps people from manufacturing or selling a particular product that is protected.

A copyright might seem like it's protecting an idea, but all that is actually protected is, again, the expression of the idea, in this case fixed in a tangible form. The copyright protecting a book protects the words on the page, not the themes or narrative arc of the story.

Lapine's objection to Seinfeld's book seems to be that Seinfeld stole her idea. I can't say whether that's true or not , but the judge's decision to toss the case illustrates the guiding concept behind trademarks, that two products should not be so similar in appearance or sound as to confuse consumers. Seinfeld's book didn't look like Lapine's, so there's no problem.

BTW, this is the first I've heard of parents sneaking health food into their kids' dinners. I do remember once my Grandma sneaking butter into some broccoli that my mother was planning to serve unadorned, though. Different times, those were.

IP slowdown as economic indicator

In case you still are not quite convinced that the global economy has slowed down quite a bit over the past 20 months or so, here's another piece of evidence of global recession.

WIPO released a study last week indicating that growth in intellectual property filings worldwide slowed down in 2007 and 2008 and that trademark filings may have actually decreased in 2008. I can't imagine this report is surprising to most, but it is nonetheless troubling.

As a purely unscientific aside, I've observed here in the Patent and Trademark Center that independent inventor and small business startup traffic has increased. It's anyone's guess as to why seemingly more people are stopping in, calling, or writing to ask about patents and trademarks, but I like to think that perhaps people who have lost their jobs are deciding that now is the time to act on ideas that they've been thinking about for years but have been too busy to pursue. Hey, somebody's gotta be an optimist...

National Medal of Innovation and Technology Laureates announced, include medical and telecommunications experts

I probably give too much attention to goofy or frivolous patents in this space.

Sure, people come up with some wacky inventions and somehow manage to get them through the patent prosecution process. And sure, those inventions offer a glimpse into the absurd side of American commerce and technology.

But the real value of the patent system is represented by people like this year's Medal of Innovation and Technology recipients, people who put their skill, training, and problem-solving ability to work to develop technologies that contribute to the world's knowledge and, often, incrementally improve the quality of life for people around the world.

Here are the winners, from the USPTO press release (hyperlinks to more info are mine):

• Dr. Forrest M. Bird for his pioneering work in the field of respiratory and cardiopulmonary care including the revolutionary BABYBird®. This device dramatically reduced the infant respiratory failure mortality rate from approximately 70 percent to 10 percent. His more recent medical invention of Intrapulmonary Percussive Ventilation (IPV) ® concepts have reduced pulmonary failure in the most critically injured military and civilian burn patients from about 75 percent to 5 percent. Dr. Bird’s innovations have saved millions of lives.
• Dr. Esther S. Takeuchi for the development of the silver vanadium oxide battery technology which powers the majority of today’s implantable cardiac defibrillators and innovations related to other enabling medical battery technologies that power implantable pacemakers, implantable neurostimulators and left ventricular assist devices. Dr. Takeuchi’s innovations have saved and dramatically improved the quality of hundreds of thousands of human lives.
• Dr. John E. Warnock and Dr. Charles M Geschke for their pioneering contributions that spurred the desktop publishing revolution and for changing the way people create and engage with information and entertainment across multiple mediums including print, Web and video.
• International Business Machines Corporation for the IBM Blue Gene supercomputer, which re-established United States leadership in high performance computing. Blue Gene’s systems architecture, design and software have delivered fundamental new science, unsurpassed speed and unparalleled energy efficiency, which have had a profound impact on the worldwide high-performance computing industry.

Ellen show producers "don't roll that way," get sued for infringement

While I spent last week on vacation back East (investigating important intellectual property matters, of course) I missed the chance to get an early scoop on what will probably be a very expensive case of intellectual property nonchalance.

The Tennessean reports that when producers of Ellen Degeneres' daytime TV talk show were approached by record company lawyers about their failure to obtain permission to use songs for the show's many dance segments they were told that the producers "did not roll that way."

It's terrible form, but I'm going to quote the Nashville Scene blog, who quoted the Tennessean, who quoted the record company lawyers' response to Ellen's producers:

"As sophisticated consumers of music," attorneys for the recording companies wrote in the suit, "Defendants knew full well that, regardless of the way they rolled, under the Copyright Act, and under state law for the pre-1972 recordings, they needed a license to use the sound recordings lawfully."

Let that be a lesson to all of us: regardless of the way you roll, mind your copyright P's and Q's.

I'm just sayin...

September is National Library Card Sign-up Month, and while you don't need to have a library card in order to utilize many of SFPL's patent, trademark, and copyright resources, I can't resist throwing a pitch to those of you who live in the area.

I know that Lawrence Lessig has used a Creative Commons license to make an online version of his latest, Remix, available for free download, but if you find it a pain to read eBooks on Muni, stop by the library and check out a copy for free.

Or, if you're getting ready to delve into a personal venture and are exploring your IP options, why not save your dough for start-up costs and use your library card to access electronic versions of many of the most popular patent and trademark titles from Nolo Press?

Want to hear the source material for the mashup that brought the issue to the foreground? Check it out here and here.

I'll stop with the librarian peer pressure, but, all I'm saying is, a little library card goes a long way.

FW: Is Creative Commons Bad for Copyright?

An interesting editorial from the folks over at copycense...