Patents, trademarks, and copyrights are designed to provide protection for inventors, entrepreneurs, and authors. In fact, your work may already be a trademark or have a copyright. However, your patent protection may be providing little protection at all.

Trademarks, copyrights and patents are different. Each gives certain rights and protections to owners and creators. The type of properties and the type of protections granted differ in each case.

Trademarks are words, symbols, designs, or phrases that identify and distinguish your products from others. When used to distinguish a service that you provide, it is called a service mark. Trademarks normally appear on a product or its packaging while service marks are used in the advertising of a service.

The ownership of a trademark arises from the use of the mark and not from the act of formally registering the trademark. In fact, one of the requirements for filing for an official trademark registration is that the owner must already be using the trademark. Your special identification may already be a legal trademark.

Although you own your trademark once you begin using it and you are entitled to trademark protection at that time, if you register your mark, there are certain additional benefits. Most of these benefits are of value only if you are involved in litigation. You are entitled to use the trademark symbol ™ even though you have not registered your trademark. Upon registration, you are entitled to use the symbol ™® to indicate that your trademark has been registered.

There are four filing requirements for a registered trademark. A written application must be submitted to the Commissioner of Patents and Trademarks. The application must be accompanied by a drawing of the mark as it actually appears. Five specimens of the trademark used on actual labels, tags, displays etc. must be supplied. And finally, a filing fee of $200 must be submitted for each trademark for which you are making an application.

A copyright is legal protection for authors of original works including literary, musical, dramatic and other intellectual creations. Copyright laws give the authors certain exclusive rights to reproduce, alter, distribute, perform, and display their works. Copyright protection exists for both published and unpublished work.

Much the same as trademark protection, copyright protection does not depend on official registration. Copyright protection begins at the time of creation. The copyright becomes the immediate property of the author who creates the work in a fixed form.

Copyright registration is a legal formality to make a public record of the basic facts of a copyright. The law offers several inducements to encourage the owners of copyrights to register. Most importantly, it is difficult to sue for infringement without having first registered.

The procedures for registering a copyright are perhaps the simplest. A completed application, a $10 fee, and a nonreturnable copy of the work being registered is all that is required. While applications take time to process, the effective date of the registration is the date on which the completed application was received.

If you intend publish or distribute your copyrighted works, whether the copyright is registered or not, you are responsible to include a notice of the copyright. That notice should include the symbol © followed by the year of first publication and the name of the owner. Failure to include the notice can result in the loss of certain additional rights belonging to the owner.

Unlike trademarks and copyrights which belong to you whether you register them or not, a patent is a right granted by the government. The patent gives the holder the right to exclude others from making, using, or selling the invention described in the patent for 17 years.

There are three different types of patents. Utility patents are what we generally think of when we talk about patents. Utility patents cover inventions which function in a unique manner to produce a utilitarian result. Design patents cover the shape or design of an item. Plant patents cover reproducible plants such as flowers and crops.

To be granted any of the three types of patents your invention must be different from what has already been known to the public and its development must be have been “unobvious”. While patent rights can be sold or transferred, only the actual inventors can apply for a patent.

A common misconception concerning patents arises from the use of the phrase “patent protection”. Actually a patent provides no protection. It is an offensive, rather than a defensive tool. It merely gives you the right to sue someone that you allege to be infringing on your invention.

Because the patent process requires that you disclose all information concerning your invention, it lasts for only 17 years, and merely gives you the right to sue, many a small inventor is reluctant to file for a patent preferring instead to maintain their invention as a trade secret.

Us presentem un cercador gratuït de ciència, tecnologia, patents i informes governamentals que hem trobat a la web. Es tracta d’ Scitopia. Aquesta eina permet cercar 3.5 milions de documents provinents de les biblioteques digitals de 21 societats científiques com l’IEE (Institute of  Electrical and Electronic Engineers), The American Institute of Physics, IOP Publishing (Institute Of Physics Publishing) i The Royal Society entre d’altres.  També inclou patents de les oficines d’Estats Units, Japó i Europa i informes del govern dels Estats Units.

La cobertura cronològica dels materials va des de 1874 fins l’actualitat. La informació obtinguda conté cita bibliogràfica i resúm dels documents. Permet accedir de forma gratuïta al text complet dels articles de revistes que el CRAI té subscrites, al text complet de les patents d’ Espacenet, US Patent Office i Japan Patent Office i al de molts informes governamentals. També dóna l’opció d’accedir amb cost al text complet dels documents que no tenim subscrits.

La navegació i la cerca són senzilles. Els resultats es presenten classificats dins de tres pestanyes: societats, patents i informes del govern, i agrupats per tema, autor, publicació, data o editor.

Un dels avantatges d’aquest cercador respecte d’altres més generalistes és la seva especialització en ciència i tecnologia, això permet que els resultats siguin més precisos i donin menys soroll.

The transfer of eco-innovation and green tech from the developped countries to the rest of the world is certainly a central aspect of the battle against climate change and resource scarcity.

The G 77 group led by China in the international climate negotiations now pushes for ‘patent free’ green tech to tackle climate change.

The fundamental question is whether the rich countries should ease the access to the technologies and the knowledge developped in their countries, often with significant public money involved (research, innovation, support to SMEs etc…), ie. have much less restrictive Intellectual Property Rights. I would say that given the urgency and dimension of the challenge (climate change and resource scarcity are worldwide issues with needed worldwide commitment) a very large access should be given to green tech and knowledge developped in the richer countries. The risk  in terms of employement and business for our companies is certainly limited compared to the opportunities offered to the same companies and especially compared to the benefits for the environment and people’s daily life around the world.

With just one week and over 250,000 sales under its belt, one would think that Verizon Wireless executives would be breaking out the bubbly to celebrate the successful release of its much-anticipated competitor to AT&T’s iPhone, the Android 2.0. But, alas, a lawsuit filed by AT&T in an Atlanta Federal Court earlier this month has forced Verizon’s management team to forgo the Dom in favor of defense attorneys.

Droid creators carefully designed the device, anticipating several potential legal problems with other competing smartphones. For instance, one of the biggest criticisms of the new phone by techies thus far is its failure to include a pinch-to-zoom feature, which would enable a Droid user to shrink and expand the screen to her liking. The feature, however, was intentionally excluded from the Droid’s wide array of functions, as Apple has recently filed a patent application for its pinch-to-zoom technology on the iPhone.

The lawsuit that pits the two mobile service provider powerhouses AT&T and Verizon against each other involves a clever ad campaign launched by Verizon earlier this month: “There’s a Map for That.” AT&T claims that the maps published by Verizon in the commercials may confuse people, duping them into thinking that the white spaces on the maps represent areas where AT&T lacks coverage. Furthermore, AT&T alleges that the ads are causing the company an incalculable market share loss. In its complaint, AT&T requested a temporary restraining order that would force the ads to be pulled until the litigation is resolved.

The new Android 2.0

Verizon claims that the suit is meritless. In response to AT&T’s seemingly weak claim, Verizon filed a scathing, forty-four page response with the court, stating climactically that “AT&T did not file the lawsuit because Verizon’s ‘There’s a Map for That’ advertisements are untrue; AT&T sued because Verizon’s ads are true and the truth hurts.”

It seems like AT&T has gotten its feathers ruffled not because the ad is deceptively wrong, but instead because the ad is deceptively right. AT&T’s real beef is that it failed to update its own 3G service in anticipation of the smartphone revolution, and it must now suffer the consequences of a poor business decision. From this tech-neophyte and iPhone devotee’s point of view, perhaps AT&T should stop whining that the smartphone underdog finally caught up in the tech race and start working on expanding its own 3G network.

– Lauren Sibyl Bair

Interesting take on drug prices in Health affairs blog– http://healthaffairs.org/blog/2009/11/24/drug-prices-and-health-reform/ –Donald Light commenting on his article “Global Drug Discovery: Europe Is Ahead” noted:

• “Europe outperformed the United States and also significantly increased its productivity of NMEs (new molecules) per billion invested. Regarding critical new drugs that are first in class, Europe and the United States were about even, but this means that U.S productivity decreased substantially and Europe productivity increased, as shown in Exhibit 4 of the article.”

He also observes:

• “European countries have also signaled more strongly that companies will be rewarded for significantly better drugs but not for marginally better ones, while U.S. purchasers tend to pay high prices for marginally better drugs as well as good ones. Although the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), the industry trade association, champions high prices, they create an industry fat on easy profits and well-documented opulence.”

And:

• “The second, bigger point of my article for Congress, employers, and insurers is that regardless how productive pharmaceutical companies are, studies show that 85-89 percent of new drugs provide little or no advantage over existing drugs when measured by clinical improvements.”
  

Medicynic believes patent reform is one way to deal with the drug cost problem as outlined here and here. We should:

• “link the length of patents to reasonable pricing. As part of the FDA approval process the proposed price of the new medication would be compared with similar medications already on the market and with the same medication in other countries. The same process that the Canadian patent drug review board uses. If priced a significant amount over the comparator, the patent length would be decreased by some period of time to be determined by the review process–there are many ways such a link could be structured. For unique innovative drugs the cost of development could also be factored into the pricing length of patent equation. Price increases during the duration of the patent would be tied to the rate of inflation. If they exceed that rate the patent length would be proportionally shortened.”

Michael Porter makes two interesting observations about innovation in the US in his BusinessWeek interview entitled Why America Needs an Economic Strategy:

… U.S. entrepreneurship has been fed by a science, technology, and innovation machine that remains by far the best in the world. While other countries increase their spending on research and development, the U.S. remains uniquely good at coaxing innovation out of its research and translating those innovations into commercial products. In 2007, American inventors registered about 80,000 patents in the U.S. patent system, where virtually all important technologies developed in any nation are patented. That’s more than the rest of the world combined

In contrast to the effectiveness of utilizing research and technology for entrepreneurial purposes, Porter notes a worrisome trend:

An inadequate rate of reinvestment in science and technology is hampering America’s feeder system for entrepreneurship. Research and development as a share of GDP has actually declined, while it has risen in many other countries. Federal policymakers recognize this problem but have failed to act.

Viewed in light of Part I of this mini-series on innovation, a natural question posts itself:

Do the new forms of experimentation, which enable the US entrepreneurial system to be so very effective in coaxing innovation out of research that has already been done, mask a fundamental decline for which there will be hell to pay?!

Two groups I’ve never hear of, the Confederacy of European Patent Information User Groups (CEPIUG) and the Patent Documentation Group (PDG) have apparently reached agreement on the main features of a new professional qualification for patent information specialists. The aim is to provide professional certification for search professionals.

The proposed qualification is to be called the “Certified Patent Information Analyst” (CPIA).

We view this as a positive development. Whereas patent attorneys have to do a training period and pass exams, There are a number of self-styled search experts with no formal scientific or legal qualifications. Some of whom have information skills like degrees in librarian science, and some have no skills at all. The ways things are going, I’d suggest calling searchers “googlers”.

The main goal of the two organisations will be to put a certification process in place that will create the title “Certified Patent Information Analyst” (CPIA).

Apparently a CPIA will be “a specialist in the retrieval and the analysis of scientific, technical, business, and legal information that is relevant for establishing the knowledge and legal status in the field of patents, according to main legislation worldwide.”

See: http://www.epo.org/topics/news/2009/20091123.html

The Key Differences Between Patents, Copyrights And Trademarks

by Michael Taylor hosted by Bruce Oliver

All three – copyrights, trademarks and patents – arise from the same basic legal need. They are different types of intellectual property that secure the rights of the owner of an invention or creation. However, there are many important differences between the three.

The primary difference is that the nature of rights accorded by patents is for a physical or conceptual invention, while that given by a copyright is for an original document, or image created by the author. A trademark, on the other hand, can be a word or a logo that can differentiate products of one firm from the others.

The next important thing that differentiates patents from others is the high level of protection provided by it due to strict liability principles. In other words, irrespective of the fact that the offender did or did not know that he was infringing the patent, he will be held responsible for the same. Thus patents provide greater safety against infringement, on the other hand copyright and trademarks offer for fair use and other exceptions.

A patent is usually awarded for a period of 20 years, after which it passes into the public domain. Whereas, as far as copyrights are concerned, they are usually given for 60-70 years, and trademarks do not cease to exist even for centuries if you want. Moreover, patents are more comprehensive and accord broader safety than others. This means that while copyrights safeguard only the expression of a particular idea, patents cover the processes as well as the fundamental principles behind a creation.

Finally, the procedures for filing an application for these different legal mechanisms are also quite different from each other. For example, while a patent requires comprehensive description of the invention to be disclosed, copyright just needs a copy of the original creation and trademark requires a database check for already existing marks that are currently in use.

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In the news . . .

Wired writer tries to find out if it’s possible to disappear in the digital world.

England’s proposed new copyright laws are extremely controversial.

Insurance company takes away Canadian woman’s long-term sick leave benefit after Facebook photos indicate she wasn’t suffering from depression.

Sony e-Reader attempts to compete with Amazon’s Kindle and Barnes & Noble’s Nook, but appears to be unavailable for holiday season. 

The MPAA aggressively pushes protective legislation.

City of Los Angeles wants $3 million repayment for Michael Jackson memorial.

Barnes & Noble blocks hostile takeover by billionaire Ron Burkle.

During latest off-shore pirate scuffle, soldiers resort to bullets after Long Range Acoustic Device proves ineffective.

TLC seeks Jon Gosselin’s secret, hand-written contract with personal assistant in breach of contract case.

Olympic gold medalist Rashid Ramzi of Bahrain stripped of 1,500 meter title for PED disqualification. Meanwhile, Time.com highlights the top sporting cheats of all time.

FDA approves Pfizer’s updated pneumococcal disease vaccine for children.

The Large Hadron Collider is back online.

American Airlines fires web designer for responding courteously to online complaint.

Sixty-nine-year-old online predator in Wales busted by wife, who posed as minor from computer in next room.

With scox in tatters, how do you a software giant defend your crap against linux ? Linux is open to all.

Well Microsoft essentially have been patenting the commands of a linux box – essentially a command called sudo, and a command called gksudo which is an gui for sudo.  There are some real idiots in the us patent office.

Recently ms was also passing off a software loader as their paid software when it had an open source licence.

It’s not good enough to show up the idiots in the patent office, and be caught stealing, while threatening to sue the linux community.

This chart was built by searching the Espacenet database for patents mentionning the prefix “dendrimer” in their title or abstract.*

*According to this AzoNano.com article : “Dendrimer, from the Greek word (dendron) for tree, refers to a synthetic, three-dimensional molecule with branching parts. Dendrimers are formed using a nano-scale, multistep fabrication process. Each step results in a new “generation” that has twice the complexity of the previous generation – a first generation dendrimer is the simplest; a tenth generation dendrimer is the most complex and can take months to engineer. Donald Tomalia, a researcher working for chemical giant Dow, first synthesized and named dendrimers in 1979.“ 

It is sometimes possible to get a refund from the USPTO where it collects fees for services that are eventually not required or not performed. Unfortunately this does not seem to include refunds of International Search fees for PCT applications.

Anyway, a Ms Karen L. Parish succeeded in diverting these refunds into her personal bank accounts in a way that the USPTO thought they were refunded to customers.

She apparently succeeded in pocketing over half a million dollars over a 15 year period before getting caught.

For more details see: http://www2.insidenova.com/isn/news/local/article/woman_sentenced_for_embezzlement/47485/

A New Jersey jury has found in favor of Novartis AG and against Teva Pharmaceuticals USA Inc. on Wednesday in suit that Novartis filed claiming Teva infringed the patent for its genital herpes drug Famvir by seeking regulatory approval to market its own generic version.

A posting to establish my standing as the originator of the Product Key-based software validation as used my Windows 7, Office, Adobe et. al.

The blatant abuse taking place, as I write, with folks glibly installing pirated versions of Windows 7 and getting bona fide updates from Microsoft is beginning to bother me on multiple fronts.

In the end, I guess, what irks me is that it is thieving.

Right now I can honestly say that we don’t have ANY non-legit pieces of software on any of our 6 machines. Yes, I have TOYED with the notion of using a ‘pirated’ copy of Acrobat because I am so disgusted with Adobe upgrade policy which precludes me from getting a genuine upgrade. But, I haven’t done it. I guess, deep down I worry that Adobe will blow up my PC! After 40 years of dealing with computer, or maybe BECAUSE of that, I am paranoid what companies could do to ME with software!

But, before I start agitating about pirated versions of Windows 7, I need to establish my credentials, show that I have some skin in this game and demonstrate that I do know what I am talking about.

I have mentioned a couple of times that way back in 1978, while working for IBM (at their Hursley Lab. in the U.K.), I came up with the notion of ’serial number’ based software validation.

Here is the original link at www.guruge.com justifying this claim.

Here is a list of links to documents, some from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office related to granted patents, that mention ME, by NAME, with my 1978 IBM Technical Disclosure as a basis.

OK?

1. Patent for ‘Software protection methods and apparatus.’ Patent # 4,525,599.  My name appears under ‘Other References.’
2. Patent for ‘Security system for microcomputers.’ Patent # 4,757,533.  My name appears under ‘Other References.’
3. Patent for ‘Code protection using cryptography.’ Patent # 4,757,534.  My name appears under ‘Other References.’
4. Patent for ‘ Computer system for preventing copying of program from a storage medium by modifying the program using a unique key.’ Patent # 4,835,682.  My name appears under ‘Other References.’
5. Patent for ‘Method and apparatus for preventing copying of an optical disk.’ Patent # 4,975,898.  My name appears under ‘Other References.’
6. Another link to patent ‘1.’ above which has my name right on the front page.

OK?

To me thieving is thieving. Yes, it is difficult to think of MSN as a victim but nonetheless it is thieving.

I have a friend, who over the course of 20 years, has declared bankruptcy TWICE! He defaulted on $4M to J.P. Morgan. He thinks it is kind of funny. He, a very nice guy, cannot for the world of him understand or appreciate that that is also thieving.

Just because you steal from a corporation or a bank that doesn’t make it different.

IF you will glibly install a pirated copy of Windows 7, without any compunction, you will, if need arises, steal directly from me — even put a gun to my head and demand my ATM card.

As the saying goes we have already established that ‘you are a whore,’ all we are now doing is trying to determine YOUR price. So that is my issue.

More later. But, as you can tell, I am not amused. Pirating Windows 7, casually declaring bankruptcy and calmly letting your house go into foreclosure are all but various forms of thieving. You have taken money or assets from somebody against their will. It may look different to breaking and entering, but the crime is THE SAME.

Sorry. I am no angel. But, thieving bothers me. Sorry.

All the best.

Anura Guruge
www.guruge.com

In H&R Block Tax Services v. Jackson Hewitt Tax Services Inc., the court stated that “although tangible in some forms, money is simply a representation of a legal obligation or abstract concept.”  A similar sort of attitude seems to be involved in the Bilski case.  Both cases involve patents where money is used a unit of measure, and this seems to cause all sorts of confusion to the courts.

Is money just a legal obligation as the court states?  The court is incorrect that money is a legal obligation.  Money exists separate from a functioning legal system.  Money is a medium of exchange that measures the total amount of goods and services that can be traded for a certain amount of money.  The court seems to be confused by the legal tender rules, but money existed long before any legal tender laws ever existed. 

Is money just an abstract concept as the court states?  Money is a unit of measure just like voltage, current, power, energy, and force.  Is the measurement of something in money more abstract than the measurement of voltage, current, power, energy, or force?  You cannot hold voltage, current, power, energy, or force in your hand.  You cannot see these units of measurement.  While money may be represented by a physical token such as a coin or piece of paper, it can also just be an entry in computer or even a piece of paper.  It is clear that money is no different than other units of measure.

Isn’t it true that money does not represent something physical like voltage, current, power, energy, or force?  No, this is clearly incorrect.  Money just represents a certain amount of goods or services.  In the H&R Block case, we could substitute money for a certain number of pigs.  Pigs are clearly physical.

But the value of money in terms of the number of pigs or other goods or services varies depending on time or place, while this is not true of voltage, current, power, energy, or force.  When we convert voltage into light or rotation of a wheel, the amount of light varies depending on the device we use to convert the voltage to light or the speed of the wheel depends on the device we use to convert voltage into the rotation of a wheel.  Similar examples can be provided for current, power, energy and force.  So clearly, when we convert a unit of measurement into something else the result varies based on the circumstances.

But money is fuzzy compared to voltage, current, power, energy, or force.  In a given situation, we know how these other units will behave based on precise mathematical equations.  On a microscopic level, we do not know for instance exactly how much light a laser diode will emit at any point in time given a certain voltage.  On a macroscopic level (macroeconomic level) we know that a certain unit of money will convert into a certain amount of goods and services, based on the total amount of money and the total amount of goods and service, when averaged over time.  This is exactly the same as the light output of a laser – namely a given voltage will result in a certain amount of light when averaged over time.  However, in both cases we do not know the exact result at any particular instant in time.  One difference is that we have to average over a longer period of time for the conversion of money to goods and services than the conversion of voltage to light.

Money is unit of measure that provides information about the world, as are voltage, current, power, energy, or force.  Devices for measuring voltage, current, power, energy, or force are clearly patentable and H&R Block’s patents clearly are just devices for measuring money.  Note that money is measured in dollars, pounds, euros or other currencies while power is measured in Watts, horsepower, calories/sec, etc.

But H&R Block’s patents are really just about information, nothing physical is happening.  While financial products deal with the intangible concept of money (prices), from an economic point of view money is information about a market.  As our economy transitions from an industrial society to an information economy, information is going to be the most important product for our economy.  Arbitrarily excluding financial products from patent protection because they deal with money makes as much sense as excluding other information processing inventions.

Perhaps inventions dealing with just transmitting or transforming information or data should not be patentable.  The telegraph and telephone are just systems for transmitting information from one place to anther.  Both of these technologies are clearly patentable.  While a telephone and telegraph create sound waves, the sound waves are just a method of communicating information.  Another area of information technology is compression codes and error correction codes.  Error correction codes are used in computers and communications and extremely important to our information society.  Error correction codes transform a set of numbers (data) into another set of numbers (a code).  The data and code are then transmitted to another location where the data is transformed and compared to the received error correction code.  Patents for information processing use real technology (internet, computers and software) to solve real world problems.  If financial products use computers (software) to implement the product, then it uses a machine.  The fact that the machine merely transforms data, usually relating to money, makes it no different than a patent relating to error correction codes.  In an information society the processing and transformation of data is central to the economy and its technology.  The transmission or transformation of data has real world effects, including the transmission or transformation of money, which is a particular type of data.

The courts and patent office should not exclude information technologies, including those in which the underlying data is money, from patent protection.  Information has real world effects and as long as a patent application relating to information can show that it has utility, then that should end the inquiry of whether the patent application is directed to statutory subject matter (35 USC 101).   When the courts and patent office exclude these technologies from patent protection, they hurt the US economy, reduce the number of high quality jobs, and cause the US to fall behind technologically.

A civil/criminal infringement action should be brought before the Court of First Instance. The case will be transferred to Civil or Commercial or Commercial-criminal Courts (according to the subject matter). It may take upto one year till a judgment is issued.

The decision of First Instance Court can be challenged before the Court of Appeals within one month from the date of decision of First Instance Court. The Appeal judgement is obtained usually within 6-8 months of filing the appeal.

The decision of Court of Appeals can be challenged before Court of Cassation within thirty days from the date of Appeal Court Judgement. An aggrieved party may approach the Court of Cassation against the decision of Court of Appeals on grounds that the contested judgment was in violation of law or there was error in the application or interpretation of law or that there were invalid procedures which influenced the judgment.

Greenpeace considers that the German patent office was wrong to issue a patent number DE 19756864 to Oliver Brüstle, and the Germans have turned to the European Court of Justice for a ruling concerning Art. 6 of Directive 98/44/EC which relates to the legal protection of biotechnological inventions.

There are ethical issues concerning patentability of medicine and medical research and granting a monopoly on a treatment, which are generally bypassed with Swiss type claims. The issue here relates to public morals concerns with destruction of fertilized human egg cells, or when an embryo is considered a life.

One cannot get patents for genetic modification of human beings or over human life. The question is what is a human? I think in this issue, the halachic position is actually more lenient than that of the German Law. It is way outside my area of competence though.

In December, we are hosting an event with German Patent Attorney Ulrich Storz and with US Patent Attorney Greg Kirsch to look at whether software, business methods, genes and stem cells should be patentable. No answers, lots of questions.

Photo: Stephen Davies | Stock.xchng

I’m not always the most likable person in the planet. In fact, when I’m under stress, I’m worse than Oscar the Grouch on steroids. But one thing I’ve learned is that I need to temper my personality, if I am to work well with other people. But there’s more to that thought of mine, though.

Something really interesting about the dragons is that quite a number of them decide for (or against) certain entrepreneurs, depending on whether they like them or not. Many times, Rachel Elnaugh had actually refused to invest in companies just because she didn’t like the people behind them. Of course, there are other factors, such as shaky financials, missing patents, etc., that turn off the investors, but personality certainly plays an important role in whether or not the dragons and entrepreneurs can work together for a resounding business success.

I suppose likability is one thing and a**-kissing is quite another. Being in business is not a popularity contest, so entrepreneurs shouldn’t be out there to make others fall in love with them. They’re there to deliver on what they promise, whether it’s goods or services. I can work with the surliest creatures on earth, for as long as I get what I paid for from them.  The sad thing is that I’ve fallen prey often enough to a**-kissers who simply can’t deliver and who don’t even have the decency to at least tell me how things stand. Although they were the most likable people in the world, they failed on the one thing that counts: delivery.

So likability is not always part of my criteria for choosing the people I work with. Foremost for me is quality of work. Soon enough down the road, likability determines the longevity of the relationship, but it won’t be the initial characteristic I’d look for in potential colleagues and employees.

The NYT is reporting on a recent patent application by Apple Computer that is particularly curious. They’re filing for a patent that enables them to put advertising on nearly any device with a screen, but that’s not the interesting part. This patent also includes an “enforcement routine” that forces people to watch the ads and respond to them. In some cases, the device could be programmed to freeze until the viewer proves they watched the ad. It seems strange for a company like Apple that is swimming in cash to propose such a strong-armed approach to ads, but you never know what they’re up to.

Read more from the NYT.

Back of the Napkin Factoid. Potash was used in soapmaking back in 1790. Today it's mostly used as fertilizer.

The first US patent was awarded to Samuel Hopkins in 1790. He patented a method for producing potash for use in soapmaking. If Samuel had applied to the USPTO of today, he might still be waiting to hear back.

Will Shakespeare: It is a new day.
Viola De Lessups: It is a new WORLD.
– Shakespeare in Love

No joke, those lines darted to mind when I read that David Kappos, the new Director of the US Patent and Trademark Office, is (1) blogging (2) about reforming the “broken patent system.” What a difference a year makes! Then the thought of examining patents all day lulled me back to sleep.

But really, this is exciting stuff. Hopefully patent reform will include fast-track applications and embrace ideas from the land of the copyleft.