Decking the halls with festive flair is a beloved tradition, from cozy and simple to dazzling displays that could rival Clark Griswold’s winter wonderland. In this yuletide landscape, lights play a starring role, sparking whole industries focused on holiday home illumination. A centerpiece of this seasonal spectacle is often the twinkling Christmas tree. Traditional tree lighting mainly focuses on the tree’s exterior, with their daytime wiring detracting from the tree’s aesthetic, requiring the wiring to be tucked away under tinsel and ornaments. Enter U.S. Patent No. 7,784,961, with its ..read more

This is the latest in the series titled “NPE Showcase,” where we discuss high-volume non-practicing entities (or as some call them, “patent trolls”). This installment will focus on a company named Sockeye Licensing TX, LLC. Sockeye owns a pair of patents broadly related to controlling a “display device” with a mobile phone. In simple terms, Sockeye claims to own the patents directed to casting video from a smart phone onto a smart TV. Sockeye has alleged its patent against both the hardware and software stacks associated with this technology. At first glance, Sockeye appears like any other hig ..read more

This post was originally published on Seyfarth’s The Blunt Truth blog. Cannabis has become a growing sector for investment with increased focus by investors and entrepreneurs. See our colleague’s impressions from the 2022 MJ BizCon cannabis conference here. With the increased funding pouring into this sector has come a desire to protect the intellectual property in the products, research, and developments brought to market. Previously, patents—a limited monopoly allowing a patent holder to bar competitors from making/using/selling/importing a claimed system or method—were of limited use for th ..read more

Utility patents are for functional inventions. Design patents protect the look of something functional, regardless of whether the functional aspects are new. Because of this, a popular use of design patents is to protect the outside of common consumer products. What’s more common than the written word? Increasingly, companies are investing in designing unique and aesthetically pleasing typefaces. A typeface is sometimes referred to as a “font,” although these two concepts are slightly different (technically, a font is a typeface having a specific size). A basic typeface is a set of characters ..read more

Background Tech companies of every kind use graphic user interfaces (“GUI”) as a powerful differentiator of products, user experience, and branding. Companies are smart to leverage GUIs. It’s well known by marketing professionals that a well-implemented GUI can positively influence a purchaser’s decision to buy a particular product or service. By contrast, sales can be adversely affected by a boring, uninspiring GUI. Given the importance of GUIs, they can be a target for copycats. However, there are effective ways to protect intellectual property in GUIs and enforce that intellectual property ..read more