Patent

A patent for an invention is the grant of a property right to the inventor, issued by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Generally, the term of a new patent is 20 years from the date on which the application for the patent was filed in the United States or, in special cases, from the date an earlier related application was filed, subject to the payment of maintenance fees. This is FindLaw’s collection of Patent articles, part of the Intellectual Property section of the Corporate Counsel Center. Law articles in this archive are predominantly written by lawyers for a professional audience seeking business solutions to legal issues. Start your free research with FindLaw.

Intellectual Property

Patent Articles

Throw a Party, Lose Your Patent Rights!

Last August, in a precedential opinion, a federal appeals court held a patent invalid because the designer of a prototype had shown the prototype to friends at a private party more than one year before a patent application for the invention was ...
Read More »
Time to Reconsider Registered Designs?

New registered design regulations came into force in the UK on 9 December 2001. The new regulations implement EU Directive 98/71/EC and aim to harmonise certain key elements of the various national registered designs systems across Europe and to ...
Read More »
Trademark Overview

A trademark is any name, logo, shape, color, sound or even smell which is used to send a message to attract potential customers and distinguishes the source of goods from those of others. Any business that uses a name, in advertising or on its web ...
Read More »
U.S. Appellate Court to Decide Whether Foreign Patent Claims Are in Play

Has the trend toward a one-stop shopping world pervaded our legal system, and specifically the patent community? We are well aware of recent globalization and the accompanying expansion of cross-border research and development, outsourcing to ...
Read More »
U.S. Supreme Court’s On-Sale Bar Decision in Pfaff v. Wells Electronics Inc.

On November 10, 1998, the United States Supreme Court issued a decision in Pfaff v. Wells Electronics, Inc., No. 97-1130, 1998 U.S. LEXIS 7268, concerning the interpretation of the "on sale" bar of 35 U.S.C. Section 102(b). Section 102(b) provides ...
Read More »
U.S. Supreme Court Vacates the Festo Decision

The U.S. Supreme Court, in a unanimous decision on May 28, 2002, vacated the judgment of the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in the long anticipated case of Festo Corp v. Shoketsu Kinzoku Kogyo Kabushiki Co. The Supreme Court found that the ...
Read More »
Understanding “Prior Art”

"Prior art" is the mass of pre-existing knowledge that an invention must distinguish over to qualify for a patent. Distinguishing over "prior art" often leads to creative ways to express or define an invention, but the threshold question is: What ...
Read More »
University Technology Transfer Practices

Prior to the passage of the Bayh-Dole Act (the "Act") by Congress in 1980, inventions, writings and creations of American academic institutions were for the most part freely contributed to the body of public knowledge. In the 1980s, following the ...
Read More »
Use Care in Drafting Provisional Applications

Many inventors file provisional applications as a first stage in applying for a patent. Provisional applications can be filed without claims, so the inventor does not have to decide which features will distinguish the invention over the "prior art ...
Read More »
Using Patents In Products Liability Cases

Several years ago I represented a child who received serious facial scars when he was thrown from a Yamaha Trimoto - three-wheeled all-terrain vehicle (ATV) - during a turn. Trimotos roll over unexpectedly because of their high center of gravity and ...
Read More »