Create, Consult, Control
News & commentary on intellectual property issues.
Mar272009 | Steve O'Donnell
Do you have hidden intellectual property?
The thing you immediately notice when looking at any large company's intellectual property profile is that it is massive. Big companies know that the demand for their products will diminish as they become obsolete, but that new products will come out of their ideas.
Their patenting procedure is to obtain patents on every idea they can, even if they don't have immediate plans to do anything with the idea. It may be years before the company is ready to do anything with their patent, if that time even comes. Even if the company has absolutely no intention to do anything with the idea, they will patent it so that they can either prevent a competitor from using that same idea or license the patent to their competitor, creating a passive revenue stream. If nothing else, a patent is an intangible asset on a balance sheet.
Many smaller companies or novice inventors think that patents only cover big, important inventions, things that are game changers. In reality, many, if not most patents, cover small innovations. Often, these innovations aren't even for what most people would consider inventions. The inability to recognize when something should be patented results in a missed opportunity. Too many inventors have lost control of their intellectual property because they never sought patent protection only to have their inventions taken by a larger company that can do a better job at marketing.
No one realizes the importance of a wide patent portfolio better than Apple. A quick search of the Patent Office finds 2531 patents assigned to Apple. Although some of these cover things that fit into most people's definition of an invention (such as their 7508662 patent for a heat dissipating device handle), a number of them cover things that people might think of as clever, but be surprised to learn that they're patented inventions (such as Patent No. 5694151 for a “Method and apparatus for providing visual feedback during manipulation of text on a computer screen.”
In the following posts I'm going to select some patents covering inventions that could easily have been overlooked by the inventor and try to help you identify what intellectual property you have hiding in plain sight.
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