IPWatchdog Unleashed

Send us Fan Mail This week on IPWatchdog Unleashed I speak with Allison Gaul who serves as legal counsel for Boston Consulting Group. She is responsible for evaluating digital products with an eye towards intellectual property strategy, value creation, and legal risk. She is also a recovering, or at least former patent attorney. She does still advise BCG on patent issues, but she is not drafting a...

Send us Fan Mail This week on IPWatchdog Unleashed we explore whether Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology has progressed to the point where it has already achieved consciousness. In a nutshell, the answer is our panel of technologists do not believe AI is very close to achieving consciousness, but that it is indeed possible for AI to reach the point of consciousness, and to even reach the poin...

Send us Fan Mail This week on IPWatchdog Unleashed we have a special conversation that was recorded at the end of our AI 2025 program in front of a live studio audience.  Joining me were Stephanie Curcio, Clint Mehall, and John Rogitz, who along with Wen Xie, make up the new IPWatchdog Advisory Committee. Each of these people have been long-time attendees at our events, they often speak on panels,...

Send us Fan Mail This week on IPWatchdog Unleashed we have a conversation with two shareholders from Wolf Greenfield. Ed Rassavage and John Strand were both speakers on our recently concluded AI 2025 program. As the program was concluding, and in front of a live studio audience, we sat down to discuss the current state of the industry from a client’s perspective.  “It’s a lot of wait-and-see unfor...

Send us Fan Mail This week on IPWatchdog Unleashed I speak with my long-time friend Jim Carmichael, who is a former Administrative Patent Judge and the founder of Carmichael IP. Jim was on the Board of Appeals and Interferences at the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), which was the predecessor to the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB). Today Jim and his firm exclusively represen...

Send us Fan Mail This week on this edition of IPWatchdog Unleashed , we speak with Sonja London. Sonia has been general counsel at TactoTek and before that she spent 14 years working for Nokia, where she oversaw Nokia's consumer electronics licensing, global licensing program for connectivity and video codecs, and was responsible for standardization. Sonja has spent the last year as President...

Send us Fan Mail This week on IPWatchdog Unleahsed we speak with James Edwards, who is the CEO of ELITE Strategic Services, a property rights advocate, lobbyist and is now also the author of the forthcoming book To Invent Is Divine: Creativity and Ownership, which addresses the disconnect between the attributes of creativity and ownership and human innovation, technological progress, and practical...

Send us Fan Mail This week on IPWatchdog LIVE we present the remarks made during the Award Ceremony at IPWatchdog LIVE 2025 on March 3, 2025. Once again this year we presented two awards at IPWatchdog LIVE; the Paul Michel Award and the Pauline Newman Award . Both awards were created with the blessing of the Judges, who play an integral role in determining who to recognize each year.  We were plea...

Send us Fan Mail This week on IPWatchdog Unleashed I speak with my friend Jason Harrier, former Chief Patent Counsel at Capital One and current co-founder and General Counsel of artificial intelligence (AI) company IP Copilot.  One of the things IP Copilot enables is the use of AI to streamline invention harvesting, running in the background as engineers and scientists engage in their daily activi...

Send us Fan Mail This week on IPWatchdog Unleashed we present another keynote speaker—Lisa Jorgensen. Jorgensen’s speech was given during lunch on Monday, March 3 at IPWatchdog LIVE 2025. Lisa Jorgensen is Deputy Director General for Patents and Technology at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). And even before assuming the position as Deputy Director General of WIPO in 2021, she w...

Send us Fan Mail This week on IPWatchdog Unleashed our conversation is with Judge John Holcomb of the United States Federal District Court for the Central District of California, which took place March 4, 2025, at IPWatchdog LIVE. Judge Holcomb is one of us. He was a patent professional—a patent litigator—before he joined the federal judiciary. He was appointed by President Donald J. Trump during...

Send us Fan Mail This week on IPWatchdog Unleashed , I'm going to talk about an issue of enormous importance. The U.S. patent system feels to me an awful lot like the Titanic right now, and it feels like we're fast approaching an iceberg with disaster imminent. The Trump Administration is making major changes to reduce the size of government to address the $37 trillion federal debt, incl...

Send us Fan Mail This week on IPWatchdog Unleashed we take a dive into the world of university technology transfer with Laura Peter, who is the Executive Director of the University of North Carolina Charlotte Office of Research Commercialization and Partnerships and is a former Deputy Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Deputy Director of the United States Patent and Trademar...

Send us Fan Mail  This week on IPWatchdog Unleashed we take a look at the importance of data transparency and standards for artificial intelligence (AI) and standard essential patents (SEPs). Our guest is Tim Pohlmann, who is the Managing Director for the Americas at LexisNexis Intellectual Property Solutions. And before he joined LexisNexis, Tim was the founder and CEO of IPLytics. Tim has worked...

Send us Fan Mail This week on IPWatchdog Unleashed we enter the world of innovation politics with a discussion about what to expect for the patent world during President Trump's second term, what to specifically expect from the Patent Office, what to expect in Congress relating to the patent reform bills that we can expect to be reintroduced, which are namely PREVAIL, which relates to reformi...

Send us Fan Mail On this episode of IP Watchdog Unleashed we speak with Scott McKeown, who is a shareholder at Wolf Greenfield. Scott leads the firm’s post grant patent practice, and he is the author of PatentsPostGrant.com, which provides inside views and news pertaining to the Nation’s busiest patent court, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) at the United States Patent and Trademark Office...

Send us Fan Mail This week on IPWatchdog Unleashed I had the opportunity to speak with my good friend Louis Foreman. Louis is the Chief Executive Officer of Enventys, which is a full-service product launch company that handles all aspects of product development, crowdfunding and ecommerce marketing. In addition to Enventys, Louis is a prolific inventor himself, he is also an Assistant Professor of...

Send us Fan Mail This week on IPWatchdog Unleashed we talk about pharmaceutical patents, pharmaceutical patent policy, and innovation.   As you may recall, back in 2022, the Inflation Reduction Act passed. And as part of that law, it gave the federal government the opportunity for the first time to “negotiate” drug prices for Medicare. The Biden Administration has viewed this as fantastic. It has...

Send us Fan Mail This week on IPWatchdog Unleashed I speak with my long-time friend, John White. Many in the patent community no doubt already know John quite well. Over 30 years ago he created the PLI Patent Bar Review Course that upwards of 40,000 patent practitioners have successfully used to study for the Patent Bar Exam. Today, John continues to teach the patent bar review, but he is also Spe...

Send us Fan Mail This week on IPWatchdog Unleashed I speak with Heath Hoglund, who until several years ago was Vice President of IP and Standards for Dolby. About 3 years ago Heath left Dolby and became President of Via Licensing Alliance, which we discuss in some detail in our conversation. And truth be told he really didn’t leave Dolby. Via administers patent pools and has historically been heav...

Send us Fan Mail This week on IPWatchdog Unleashed we speak with Arthur Daemmrich, who is the Director of the Consortium of Science, Policy and Outcomes at Arizona State University. Arthur is a historian who was previously director of the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation at the Smithsonian Institution. We speak with Arthur this week about the role patents have played in in...

Send us Fan Mail This week on IPWatchdog Unleashed we are going to dive into the online gaming and game development world in a conversation about gaming, intellectual property, licensing, game development, branding and much more. Our conversation this week focuses on Spaceport Technologies, which is a technology company that enables brand owners to monetize their IP and game platforms to offer con...

Send us Fan Mail This week my conversation is with Carlo Cotrone, who is a Chief IP Counsel and frequent contributor to IPWatchdog, both our online publication and at our in-person programs. Carlo writes and speaks frequently about setting up, growing and managing in-house IP departments, and that is the focus of our conversation. We discuss taking a holistic view that focuses on the IP strategy,...

Send us Fan Mail This week my conversation is with Leo White, who is Chief IP Counsel and Associate General Counsel for The Duracell Company. Leo is a patent professional by training, first starting out as an engineer, then like so many in the patent field have done he became a patent agent, then went to law school, and thanks to hard work, good mentoring and being in the right place at the right...

Send us Fan Mail This week on IPWatchdog Unleashed we speak with Brian Hinman, who is one of the leading IP executives and investors in the world. Brian has held senior executive positions at leading technology companies, such as IBM, Philips and Verizon. And after spending more than 6 years as the Chief Innovation Officer for Aon, today he is Chief IP Officer for Cote Capital.  During our convers...