Frequently a great invention or a meaningful innovation requires input from an outsider with a new perspective. Those close to a problem, including or even especially the leading experts with years of deep experience, can easily become stuck in an intellectual rut that drives them to see the problem in their own incomplete way. Outsiders …
The Invention of the Magnetic Strip on Plastic Cards Read More »
Among the many barriers to innovation success, one of the most painful and dangerous is rapidly gaining momentum in the United States due to an almost perfect storm of challenges to patent value. I speak of the blight of “efficient infringers,” the many companies, often large and politically influential, who make the cruel calculation that …
Efficient Infringers: A Vibrant Source of Innovation Fatigue Read More »
After seven years of working with intellectual property and innovation in China, I’ve seen some of the ups and downs as well as the gross misunderstanding of Chinese innovation and IP in the West. I’d like to briefly summarize what I’ve seen. First, when it comes to innovation in science and industry, graduates of Chinese …
Pop stars seem to get all the publicity, so it’s cool that CNN finally did a major story about a real inventor and his useful, practical, real-world anti-gravity patent, US Patent #5255452, “Method and Means for Creating Anti-gravity Illusion” by Michael J. Jackson. Heard of him? Apparently this inventor did a little singing and dancing …
CNN Finally Covers a Great American Inventor and His Patent Read More »
Under the America Invents Act, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) was given broad new powers to “correct” past mistakes in issuing patents through the power given to the PTAB, the Patent Trials and Appeals Board. The PTAB is an administrative law that decides issues of patentability, formed on September 16, 2012 under …
A Surprising Insight About the USPTO’s “Patent Death Squad” Read More »
A book on World War II teaches a lesson for today on innovation. In Churchill and Orwell: The Fight for Freedom by Pulitzer-prize winning author Thomas E. Ricks (New York: Penguin, 2017), we learn about some of the reasons England struggled to defend itself effectively in dealing with Germany. A key problem discussed by Ricks …
Innovation Fatigue: How Britain Almost Lost the War Against Hitler Read More »
For those of us working with innovators seeking to build and grow much-needed businesses and bring new valuable new products to the world, it’s painful to survey the damage that has been done to the patent system in the United States over the past decade and the corresponding damage to innovation. Many factors have come …
America’s Patent Apocalypse and the USPTO’s Patent Death Squad Read More »
Many of the greatest inventions in America came from immigrants. See Steve Brachman’s article, “American innovation has been fueled by immigrant inventors” at IP Watchdog. Nearly all of our inventions, in fact, came from people who were either immigrants or descendants of immigrants (sometimes we seem to forget our own roots!). Immigrants with skills and …
Be careful about the vehicle you’ve been driving. As sturdy, tangible, useful, and inventive as it looks to you, it may turn out to be merely an abstraction, perhaps nothing more than the mere idea of “transportation” or “going places,” making it unworthy of the thousands of patents protecting its numerous technologies — if the …
One of the great challenges in intellectual property work is translation of foreign documents. Translating between Chinese and English is especially difficult for machine translation, where strange or even nonsense results are common due to the complexity of Chinese and the difficult legal and technical phrasing that is common in patents. Google Translate is quite …