Silicon Valley IP Licensing Law Blog Silicon Valley’s Resource to Intellectual Property Licensing

When an enterpreneur calls me with questions about launching a new start-up, he or she is inevitably concerned about a single issue: protecting his or her ideas.
Most are a little disappointed to learn that ideas alone are not something that you can protect with an IP filing.
So, if ideas alone are not protectable, how [...]

In this day and age, it is very easy to find someone to create almost anything for you or your business at the mere click of the mouse; however, what most people forget when they make that easy hiring decision: paying for the work does not mean that you OWN what was created–it merely means [...]

Given my Silicon Valley location, I often receive calls from start-ups who want to “give equity” to a developer that they’ve just started working with. When I receive these calls, I inevitably have a talk with the client or prospective client urging them to consider an alternative: entering into a collaboration agreement with the [...]

I wanted to share with blog readers an interview that I recently had with Technology Transfer Tactics on the issue of whether poster presentations jeopardize a tech transfer office’s commercialization offices. While the issue does not have much application to the business world and is really very specific to intellectual property which is developed [...]

As the Silicon Valley IP Licensing Blog has been reporting, the Associated Press has already initiated an effort to impose its view of what constitutes fair use on the blogosphere. However, I came across today an interesting interview by Ars Technica, which offers some insight on how the Associated Press plans to go about [...]

The Copyright Office has issued a response to last week’s reports of a backlog at the Copyright Office.
In an email sent out to Copyright Office subscribers, the Copyright Office stated as follows:
A recent Washington Post article focused on the lengthy processing times the Copyright Office is experiencing in wake of its transition from a [...]

The Copyright Office has announced that a new fee increase will be effective August 1, 2009. Attached is the Analysis and Proposed Fee Adjustment Schedule submitted by the Copyright Office to Congress.
I spent a few minutes reviewing the new pricelist, and in my opinion, the increases are fairly modest and should not be much [...]

The Washington Post reported last week that the backlog issues, which once were limited to the Patent Office have now spilled over into the Copyright Office as well.
According to the Washington Post, the delays mean that it now takes eighteen months instead of six months to receive a copyright registration, and the expectation is that [...]

Amazon has just released the beta of its new Kindle Publishing for Blogs, and the blogosphere is starting to react to Amazon’s new licensing terms in its terms and conditions.
What are bloggers saying? Well, the early consensus seems to be that while the concept of blog content licensing to Kindle is good, the required [...]

Have you done a search on the web lately to see if any of your company’s creative works have been infringed?
Well, according to an article by The Mercury News discussing these new trends in digital piracy, publishers and authors are increasingly discovering that unauthorized copies of their works are being sold over the Internet [...]