Minneapolis Patent Law Blog

A phrase that is familiar among inventors, “Everything that can be invented has been invented,” is commonly attributed to a former U.S. Patent and Trademark Office commissioner near the turn of the 20th century, although some claim the quote came from a book published much later. Regardless of its origins, you and other inventors in South Dakota might think the saying is a bit silly. This certainly is an age of great technological progress, and there can be no predicting the inventions and innovations in the decades to come.

You may worry whether the influx of new ideas from researchers, scientists and innovators around the world can affect your own business. It may dismay you to learn that patent infringement occurs on a daily basis, whether accidental or intentional.

Patent law has a reputation as being a rather muted area of practice. Those dedicated to it know that isn't true. It does have its quiet moments and the amount of detail to attention and paperwork it requires can be off-putting to some. But managing patents, trademarks and copyright processes is how new ideas begin to create value and that fosters innovation. There's nothing dull about that.

It is possible for a product and its brand to become so successful over time that it begins to become generic and the product risks the worst of all fates, genericide. Examples of this phenomena are easy to find. Aspirin, cellophane, linoleum and thermos were once trademark names for specific products and are now synonymous with a host of similar products. Some examples of marks that appear to be on the road to genericide include Kleenex, Dumpster and frisbee.

It's sometimes hard to know who is the winner and who is the loser in a legal dispute. When the ball in play happens to be patent law, it can make filling in the win-loss columns even harder. That may be the case with two recent decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court.

We wrote about this issue in several previous posts, the most recent being in February when we noted that we would be watching to see how a challenge to what is called inter partes review (IPR) would shake out. At the time, observers had anticipated that the ruling wouldn't come before June, but the justices moved more quickly than that, issuing two rulings in related cases late last month.

Facebook is in the crosshairs over subscribers' personal data privacy. The issue is that the company, Cambridge Analytica, mined data of millions of Facebook users and allegedly used it to target political ads more than two years ago. Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg acknowledges Facebook mishandled the matter saying, "We made mistakes and I own them."

This is not the first scandal for the social media company. Back in 2015, a YouTube video creator accused Facebook of facilitating the thefts of hundreds of ostensibly copyrighted videos to boost its numbers on the volume of views it had provided. The allegation was that the Facebook users uploaded the videos without permission or credit. The concern was that copyright holders were losing out on potential revenue. The matter led to Facebook creating controls, but it took some 18 months.