Author: Delain Law Office

How to Register a Copyright

Posted on by Delain Law Office

U.S. Copyright Office – Online Services (eCO: Electronic Copyright Office).

It’s actually a very simple process, except that the Copyright Office has mashed its forms into one form and has not done anyone any favors in that revision.

You fill out the form at the linked page, you write a check for $45.00 to the REGISTER OF COPYRIGHT, and you send the form, the check and either one or two copies of the work to be registered (depending on whether the work is published or not) in to the US Copyright Office in Washington D.C. You then wait several months until a Certificate of Copyright is returned to you. Note that even though the registration certificate may take months to come back to you, the copyright is presumed to be registered when your mailing is received by the Copyright Office. You might therefore want to include some sort of proof of receipt with your mailing.

Copyright actually attaches the instant a work of authorship is affixed in a tangible medium, but the protection is less than ideal until that work is sent to the Copyright Office and registered. The federal courts, which have exclusive jurisdiction over copyright matters, won’t even look at a case where an unregistered copyright is infringed. No statutory damages are available to unregistered works, which means that the copyright owner must prove actual damages from the infringement to get any relief at all.

Since copyright is so easy to register, there really is no reason not to register it. Spend the $45 and get full protection for your valuable works of authorship.

The USPTO, NIHFF & Ad Council are inspiring invention

Posted on by Delain Law Office

Press Release, 08-41.

This is so cool. A contest for inventive kids. Open to elementary, middle and high school kids, the “inspiring innovation” campaign, launched in 2007, is working at making invention and idea development a part of the everyday lives of American kids (and more power to them); the idea is to motivate kids to pursue careers in invention and innovation.

Keep it coming, folks! American kids need this and programs like it. The US is beginning to struggle to stay at the top of the pile (oh…you hadn’t noticed that?) in part because the kids turn their noses up at math and science. Well, math and science aren’t so dull, boys and girls, when math and science let you do cool things like play video games, turn on a light, and watch cable TV.

I really hope that the teachers can be encouraged to get their kids participating in programs like this one; here in the wilds of upstate New York, schoolkids are invited to participate in the Invention Convention. Yes, we get a goodly few, but there are a lot of kids who don’t participate but could with their teachers’ help…

Abbreviations:

USPTO = US Patent & Trademark Office

NIHFF = National Inventors’ Hall of Fame Foundation

Jacobsen v. Katzer, from the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit

Posted on by Delain Law Office

Jacobsen v. Katzer – AltLaw.

This is a case from the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (which holds exclusive jurisdiction over patent appellate matters) that considers the intersection of copyright and licensing law. Is it possible for a copyright holder to dedicate certain work to free public use and yet enforce an A open source @ copyright license to control the future distribution and modification of that work?

Here, the plaintiff holds a copyright that he dedicated to the public domain through open-source licensing. The license for open-source technology, though, has a catch (the source of all open-source code must be acknowledged in downstream works), and the downstream users have to comply with the catch or be caught infringing the open-source license.

Meetings

Posted on by Delain Law Office

This post shows the meetings that I am scheduled to attend. I will be out of the office and unavailable by phone or email during these times. This page will be updated as appropriate.

IP Audit a Necessity for Due Diligence

Posted on by Delain Law Office

What IS an IP audit, anyway?

An IP audit is a systematic categorization of all of your business’s intellectual property, including but not limited to:

  • Inventions (patented and unpatented)
  • Copyrights (registered and unregistered)
  • Trademarks (registered and unregistered)
  • Trade Dress (registered and unregistered)
  • Trade Secrets (obviously unregistered)

This categorization, with a simultaneous search for areas where your IP may have “holes,” is done by an intellectual property attorney in cooperation with your firm’s management team; despite the word “audit,” this is NOT an accounting function (although certainly an accountant belongs on your firm’s management team and probably on the IP audit team).

Use an IP audit as due diligence when you plan to merge, divest, buy, sell, create, license, franchise your property. Also use an IP audit when there has been a shift in the law that governs IP.

For more information about IP audits, read Nancy’s article, published in the December 2003 issue of Les Nouvelles (the flagship publication of the Licensing Executives’ Society), The Intellectual Property Audit (.pdf format) or visit our IP Audit webpage.