Avoid the Legal Horrors with Julie King: Patent, Trademark, and Business Strategy

Let’s look at the specific risks of poor intellectual property succession planning. These are the ghosts of your assets that haunt your legacy if you fail to plan properly. 1. The Patent Ghost: Missing the Clock. The executor of your estate is managing property taxes, house sales, and who gets the valuable coin collection; they are most likely not automatically tracking USPTO patent maintenance fe...

Most people think of their IP like a regular asset that upon their death will either transfer automatically or be handled easily by the executor of their estate. But IP is different. IP is a tricky beast. The biggest, most terrifying difference is this: Patents and trademarks are time-sensitive, living assets that require active maintenance and use to survive and special documents to transfer owne...

You spend years, effort, and serious money, often tens of thousands of dollars, to create a valuable intellectual property empire. You secure those priceless patents, register those robust trademarks, protect your valuable copyrights, and lock down those precious trade secrets. You’ve built an IP asset portfolio designed to generate income for years, even decades. But here is the true terror: When...

A King Patent Law, PLLC Guide to Avoiding the Potentially Fatal Flaws of DIY and Online Services November is a great time to be thankful for the assets you've built, and a smart business owner knows that the intellectual property (IP) protecting their unique creations is one of the most valuable assets of all. But once you've invented that brilliant gadget or coined that killer brand name, who do...

Your U.S. patent is powerful at the border! Even if knockoffs are manufactured and sold freely overseas without you being able to do much about it, your patent gives you the power to stop them from entering the lucrative U.S. market. The Power Move: You can record your granted U.S. patent (and trademark) with U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP). Not all border patrol agents are sweeping throu...

Before you even start manufacturing, you find out your invention would be infringing on another patent. Your freedom-to-operate search revealed a competitor holds a patent on a core component. Now what? Don't Panic. Redesign! The Choice: You face two options, and only one protects your long-term profit: 1. The Licensing Trap: Buy the patent rights, which can be expensive. Alternatively, pay a roya...

Here’s the true cost of manufacturing your invention overseas. The minute you send your blueprints to a manufacturer, you introduce a massive risk of intellectual property theft. The Horror: When an idea is copied overseas, it's virtually impossible for a small business to stop it. Your U.S. patent is powerful here, but useless in their jurisdiction. International patents can help, but they’re rea...

Let’s look at the two scariest patent searches! An inventor should run two different types of patent searches, and mixing them up is a huge mistake that can cost millions. 1. Patentability Search: Answers the question, " Is my invention new enough to get a patent? " To be granted a patent, an invention must be both novel and non-obviousness. This is the search that investigates those issues. It al...

Welcome, innovators, to a critical lesson that separates successful patent entrepreneurs from those whose patents collect dust. I’m Julie King, and today I’m revealing the terrifying truth that owning a patent does not automatically give you the right to sell your invention. You see, a patent is a legal shield, a right to exclude, not a sword you can wield freely in the marketplace. In this episod...

Be careful not to let your trade secrets die with you, or you may accidentally kill your business. If you have a proprietary formula, customer list, or algorithm that gives you your competitive edge, it’s not registered with the government. Its protection relies entirely on secrecy and contracts. The Horror can be that since there is no government registration, if the owner dies unexpectedly, and...

Fatal mistakes are often made when people unfamiliar with patent and trademark law leave that kind of intellectual property to people in their will or when they inherit it. At the Mountains of Madness: A Vague Will. “’All patents,” “all trademarks,” or “all intellectual property” owned by me may sound like a great clause to have in a will. It’s better than nothing, yes, and fine as a catch-all in...

The patent clock keeps ticking after you die! A utility patent is a time-sensitive asset. If you own the patent rights to your invention, you must make sure it’s managed properly after your death. Even if your heirs successfully inherit the patent, if they don't know how to manage it, the rights may die a premature death. The Horror is that heirs unfamiliar with the invention and the patent protec...

Not having provisions about control of your business’ intellectual property in your business operating documents is a grave mistake in intellectual property protection. When one of the owners of a business dies, their ownership share is handled by their estate planning documents and the business’ operating documents, such as an LLC’s operating agreement or a corporation’s bylaws and shareholder ag...

35 years is a special time for copyrights created after 1978. A right emerges from lurking in the shadows. Importantly, that right can transfer to whoever inherits your original copyright rights. This copyright jump scare is the termination provision in the 1976 Copyright Act that allows creators who transferred their copyright rights to someone else to reclaim those rights, even if they were assi...

What’s the intellectual property horror lurking in the closet that gets overlooked the most? Welcome to the final, and perhaps most terrifying, week of Spooky Season. We’ve talked about how patents, trademarks, and trade dress are all massive business assets. But too often, people spend a good deal of time and money protecting those assets, but then they leave their future value to chance. I'm tal...

The most powerful strategy for protecting the design of a physical product is the dual protection of a design patent and trade dress. 1. Start with the patent: File the design patent application early for a 15-year period of exclusivity. 2. Build the trade dress : Once your product has been around long enough for the public to recognize the design as an indicator of your brand, you have the acquir...

Both design patents and trade dress have one unfortunate thing in common: functionality of the design can be a killer. You cannot protect a design feature if it is essential to the product's use or purpose. The Test: If a unique shape makes the product work better, cheaper, or easier, it's functional and cannot be protected by Trade Dress and will be much harder to protect with a Design Patent. Fo...

Trade Dress is a type of trademark that protects the overall look and feel of a product or its packaging. It’s the brand's persistent visual identity. What it Protects: Elements like a product's distinctive shape, size, color combination, texture, or even the layout of a retail store (think the distinctive look of a McDonald's). The iconic, curvy shape of the Coca-Cola bottle is the textbook examp...

Here’s a Petrifying Patent Fact: For protecting a product, most people only think of utility patents, which protect how something works. But there's also a powerful tool for protecting how it looks: the design patent . A Design Patent protects the ornamental appearance of an article of manufacture. Think of it as a blueprint for the eye. • What it Protects: The specific shape, configuration, or su...

How do you protect how your product looks? Today we’re tackling the Two-Headed Monster of Design IP: design patents and trade dress trademarks. This is where serious protection and some serious money is for innovators in product manufacturing and design. I’m Julie King of King Patent Law, and welcome to week 4 of this year’s Spooky Season posts! This week’s topic covers an often-neglected but impo...

Trademark genericide is a real-life horror story! What happens when your brand is too good? It dies of success! Genericide is the legal process where a trademark (like the original name for aspirin) becomes the common name for an entire type of product. The public no longer thinks of the brand; they think of the item itself. The Tragic Tale of the Escalator: The word Escalator was once a trademark...

Trademark Terror for T-Shirt Tycoons! If you’re a designer, a band, or anyone else making and selling apparel, one of the biggest, scariest mistakes you can make is confusing Decoration with Brand Identification. The Ornamental Trap To be granted trademark registration, the mark must function as a source identifier. That means consumers must look at the name, logo, or slogan and think: "This is th...

Unlike patents, trademarks can live forever. Patents (like the one for the Ouija board's mechanism) die after about 20 years. Trademarks (like the one for the Oujia brand name) can last forever, provided you keep using them and file the necessary maintenance documents with the USPTO. A trademark is the only major IP registration that can be renewed indefinitely. This perpetual life is why names li...

Trademarks aren’t limited to the words connected with a brand. Visual elements like logos, packaging, and unique shapes, like a Coca-Cola bottle, can be trademarks, too. The Universal Monsters movies are protected by a slew of trademark and copyright registrations. Most of the images of the monsters are protected by copyright. However, Universal also registered the appearance of the Wolfman charac...

Just because someone else has your name doesn't necessarily mean you're doomed! Trademark protection is categorized by goods and services (Classes). This is how you can have DOVE chocolate and DOVE soap. There are 45 different classes of goods and services available. Thirty-four are for goods, and 11 are for services. Sometimes it can be tricky to figure out which classes your goods or services fi...