• Posts Tagged ‘employment agreement’

    Read It Twice

    by  • November 7, 2016 • patent • 0 Comments

    Boy, is it hard to write an effective invention assignment for an employment agreement. First, under US law only a natural person can be an inventor, not a juristic person. When you have an employee whose job is inventing, the solution is to create an automatic assignment to the employer, which is generally done...

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    Be Careful What You Sign – UPDATE

    by  • September 16, 2015 • trademark • 0 Comments

    Update: The Court of Appeals for the First Circuit affirmed that the hospital was the owner of the trademarks. Greene conceded that the Massachusetts General Hospital IP Policy was broad enough to cover the trademarks he adopted and used for a program associated with MGH. The court rejected his contract defenses of equitable estoppel,...

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    You Need to Take Care of the Little Details

    by  • June 3, 2015 • patent • 0 Comments

    Every patent litigation starts with an examination of the chain of title, or at least it should. Often there are multiple inventors; every link for each one has to be there, and even the language of the employment agreement has to be just right. Even after that, every corporate assignment has to be done...

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    Correcting Inventorship to Enhance Your Reputation

    by  • April 8, 2013 • patent • 0 Comments

    To have constitutional standing for a claim, the remedy must provide some redress for the claimant. In the case of correcting inventorship on a patent, it generally means the correction will provide a financial advantage, although in theory it could be a reputational advantage. But Shukh v. Seagate Technology, LLC shows that’s pretty hard...

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    Be Careful What You Sign

    by  • December 21, 2012 • trademark • 1 Comment

    There is a pair of interesting decisions out of the District of Massachusetts about ownership of the marks “Collaborative Problem Solving,” “Collaborative Problem Solving Approach” (the “CPS Marks”), “Think:Kids” and “Think:Kids: Rethinking Challenging Kids” (the “Think:Kids” Marks). “Interesting” because it is a case where marks that preexisted a business relationship were lost by signing...

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    Unexciting Patent Ownership Decision

    by  • July 15, 2012 • patent

    No one else seems to have reported much on this case, which is understandable – there’s not really any new ground covered.  But it is a Federal Circuit decision, so I’ll give you a brief summary. Yale Preston was an employee of Marathon Oil Co. A few days after his employment began, at the...

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    The Danger of Overreaching

    by  • March 11, 2012 • copyright, patent, trade dress, trademark

    drawing and specimen for plaintiff’s trade dress registration Plaintiff Lauren Brenner started Pure Power Boot Camp, a military-style exercise facility. She hired the defendants and they decided to start a competing business called Warrior Fitness Boot Camp. The defendants behaved despicably; while still her employees they had one’s client/girlfriend promote Warrior Fitness to Pure...

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