What is innovative? Who owns it? What is the best way to generate return on inventions and other works? These are among the most vexing questions facing businesses today. A new book, by Bruce Berman, The Intangible Investor, takes a hard look at the ways companies, large and small, profit from inventions, and the rights […]
New Book Takes a Hard Look at How Businesses and People Profit from IP
2013 in review
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2013 annual report for us. Here’s an excerpt: The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 21,000 times in 2013. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 8 sold-out performances for that many people […]
Intellectual Property Risk Mitigation
By Donal O’Connell Risk Risk is the chance of something going wrong, and the danger that damage or loss will occur, whereas risk management is the process of analysing exposure to risk and determining how best to then handle such exposure. Intellectual Property (IP) By its very nature, there are both rewards and risks associated […]
Licensing and IP Issues for Mobile and Social Game Developers
By Sam Wiley and Adam Falconer Introduction Gaming is big business, involving unique opportunities and challenges. In the gaming ecosystem, there are technology and hardware companies, production companies, investors and publishers, content owners, consumers, and of course developers, designers and artists. As the lines between mobile app development, social gaming and traditional gaming continue to […]
Invention harvesting
By Donal O’Connell To invent: To invent means to produce or contrive something previously unknown by the use of ingenuity or imagination. An inventor is therefore someone who invents, someone who devises some new process, appliance, machine, or article. When a new product appears, the person who first thought of it, and who first defined […]
In Defense of Patent Trolls
By Ian Maxwell In this essay I will avoid using the term ‘Non-Practicing Entity’ because I am sick of hearing the ubiquitous ‘pejorative’ associated with the explanation of relationship between the terms ‘Non-Practicing Entities’ and ‘patent trolls’. Let’s just call a spade a spade – they are patent trolls. This is not to say that […]
Apple v Samsung: The War Over “Cool”

By Neil Wilkof Last August, we published a blog post–“Apple v Samsung: Don’t Take Your Eyes Off the Brand and User App Ball” (here) in which we questioned whether Apple’s successful verdict in suit against Samsung would be a game changer in the smartphone world. Views were heard far and wide than the case would have […]
IP CloseUp 30 is a handy tool for those who want to track the most active IP stocks in an instant
By Bruce Berman IP CloseUp is pleased to announce the IP CloseUp® 30 a free, all-in-one information update of the leading patent stocks. A click or a tap is all investors, innovators, lawyers and or businesses to track the ups and downs of the rapidly expanding universe of IP-sensitive stocks. In addition to Acacia, WiLAN and Virnetx, smaller players like Marathon Patent […]
The Rebranding of Blackberry: Of Geese, Ganders and Keys
By Neil Wilkof As probably many Kat readers are well aware, Research in Motion (RIM) issued three announcements at the end of January—one large, one medium and one small (sort of like the egg rack at this Kat’s local grocery) here. First the “large”—after much anticipation, the company announced the launch of the BlackBerry10 smartphone […]
Patent Valuation and Baseball Players
By David Wanetick It appears that patents and baseball players share the same value curve. Similar Life Expectancy: The statutory life of a patent is 20 years. Twenty years is about as long as you can expect a baseball player to last. After studying the 5,989 position players who began their careers between 1902 and […]