Blawg Review #17 is up on Securing Innovation, the business blog of IP.com Inc. SInce September 29th is DÃa del Inventor in Argentina, this week’s Review is in commemoration of Hungarian inventor Laszlo Biro. Biro brought us the ballpoint pen 70 years ago this summer (designed in his garage in Buenos Aires).
After obtaining the patent rights to a ball pen, Marcel Bich introduced his own ball pen in France in December 1950 under the name BIC, a shortened, easy-to-remember version of his own name. In 2002, the BIC® Cristal® ballpoint pen entered the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art of New York (MOMA), at the Department of Architecture and Design. By 2005 BIC had sold its hundred billionth ballpoint pen. (Did you ever wonder where the BIC® logo comes from?)
The American Bar Association Section of Intellectual Property Law has launched Landslideâ„¢, a bi-monthly magazine that offers news and analysis on patents, trademarks, copyrights and related topics. Written by and for an audience of intellectual property lawyers, the magazine will cover this rapidly evolving legal specialization through an emphasis that includes business, technology, the arts, legislation and international developments.
In this IP-heavy edition of Blawg Review, we note that on the Patent Librarian’s Notebook, there’s a comparison of free patent databases. Meanwhile, David Pearce at IPKat explains how the USPTO/EPO clogs up the prosecution highway with red tape. This test scheme will allow patent applications that have been examined and allowed in either the USPTO or the EPO to be fast-tracked in the other office.
We’re still trying to understand how some fruit now comes with an end-user license agreement to protect the intellectual property (Jeremy Telman at the ContractsProf Blog).
