Archive

Before your entrepreneurial enthusiasm takes over and you rush to market with a trademark that merely describes the product or service you’re selling, take a breath.  Your trademark may become your new business’s most valuable asset.  So take the time up front to come up with a strong, protectable, and distinguishable trademark. Once you have […]

Contributed by: Jeffrey G. Sheldon from Law on IP. They can be valuable, but they are not worth as much as they were yesterday. A little background: Design patents cover ornamental designs. They are unlike utility patents which cover the useful feature of inventions. The applicable statute for infringement of a design patent states that […]

On May 11, 2016, President Obama signed into law the Defend Trade Secrets Act of 2016 (DTSA), creating the first federal civil remedy for trade secret misappropriation.  The new law is designed to better protect businesses against the economic losses suffered from trade secret theft. Before being sent to the Oval Office, the Senate unanimously […]

Maui has a flourishing food industry, from locally grown pickles and cookies that melt in your mouth to all-organic energy bars that are out of this world delicious.  What gives these companies their competitive edge is often their recipe.  A recipe is usually a combination of ingredients with a set of instructions for their preparation.  Recipes can […]

Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court announced that it will address what was described by the petitioners in the case as “the single most vexing, unresolved question in all of copyright”; that is, whether apparel can be protected by copyright law. U.S. copyright law protects “original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of […]

A decision on August 13, 2015 by the Federal Circuit increases the probability that non-practicing entities, referred to by some as “patent trolls”, will be rolling out more law suits. Until the August 13 decision, it was very difficult to enforce a patent where multiple parties are needed to infringe. For example, if a method […]

By Shannon Sheldon and Jeffrey G. Sheldon All rights reserved…Or are they? Your company retains an outside programmer to write software that later is copied by a competitor. Your company sues the competitor, but loses. Or, your company retains an outside programmer to write software for internal use. The program is so good that your […]

On January 20 2015, President Obama in his State of the Union address called for congressional action on cybersecurity, invoking the need to protect our businesses’ privacy, trade secrets and the economy.  Theft of intellectual property is estimated to cost U.S. firms billions of dollars annually.  Much of this loss is attributable to the misappropriation […]