employment agreement
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Read It Twice
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 when […] Continue reading
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Why You Have That Employment Agreement Gobbledygook
Plaintiff Advanced Video Technologies has been around the block a few times already. AVT claimed to be the successor to a patent for a video codec. It had successfully asserted the patent against other defendants but ran into some problems when trying to sue HTC Corp., Blackberry and Motorola Mobility. Its first attempt failed because […] Continue reading
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Be Careful What You Sign – UPDATE
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, failure […] Continue reading
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You Need to Take Care of the Little Details
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 properly. […] Continue reading
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Correcting Inventorship to Enhance Your Reputation
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 to […] Continue reading
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Patent Ownership Not a Federal Question (at least in this case)
Is patent ownership a question of federal law? It depends. In the case of Millepede Marketing Ltd. v. Harsley, it’s not. The recent Supreme Court decision Gunn v. Minton* provides the analytical framework: a matter is one for federal jurisdiction if (a) federal law creates the cause of action asserted or (b) a federal issue […] Continue reading
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Be Careful What You Sign
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 an […] Continue reading
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Unexciting Patent Ownership Decision
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 same […] Continue reading
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Why You Need an Ownership Clause in Your Employee Agreements
An old case popped out on Westlaw for some reason, but it is an interesting one, about ownership of trade secrets created by an employee. So I thought it was worth writing about. Plaintiff Premier Displays & Exhibits and defendant EWI Worldwide are both in the business of design and fabrication of displays and exhibits […] Continue reading
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The Danger of Overreaching
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 Power […] Continue reading
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