Can someone understand it quickly enough to care?

The audience for your intellectual property is rarely just a patent examiner at the United States Patent and Trademark Office: it is a judge deciding a motion; a jury seeing and learning about the ...

A recent precedential decision from the United States Patent Trademark Office's (USPTO) Appeals Review Panel, Ex parte Desjardins, is a good example of what happens when the wrong question gets asked and then corrected.

The Wrong Question

For a while now, many §101 rejections, particularly in AI, have ...

It’s funny because it’s true, teenagers don’t want to talk. Not to nosy parents, not to teachers, not to coaches. Definitely not to anyone who isn’t at least 5% charged.

At least, that’s what we (as adults) tell ourselves. But what if the answer has been sitting right in front of us the whole time? What if the questions are just… bad?  Or, at the risk of sounding a little meta, what if better questions change the conversation entirely?

One that actually ...

Either way, in trademark law, color is not preferred! Despite how counterintuitive it seems, black and white still rules supreme when it comes to filing design trademark applications, and for good reason.

The Black-and-White Rule

Under long-standing United State Patent and Trademark (USPTO) practice, a design mark filed in ...

There is a shift happening in patent law, but its real impact will not be felt in policy statements...it will be felt in federal courtrooms.

Recently, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) filed a Statement of Interest in Collision Communications, Inc. v. Samsung Electronics Co., reinforcing a principle that has quietly eroded over time: a patent is a right to exclude, and injunctions are central to that right.

At first glance, that sounds obvious, patents have always been ...

During the diligence step for an M&A, it is surprisingly common to discover that some of the entity’s intellectual property (IP) was never formally assigned to the company in the first place. It's not the patents or the registered trademarks; it’s the overlooked assets.

Assets such as:

• Website content and marketing copy
• Graphics, videos, and blog articles
• Software written by contractors
• Domain names registered under a founder’s personal account
• Internal ...

This is not a mere coincidence, it is strategy. Taken together, these announcements signal something more significant than just administrative expansion. They reflect a structural shift where innovation is happening and how federal intellectual property (IP) infrastructure is responding.

We are witnessing the expansion of a new “Innovation Frontier”.

Why Montana and ...

I’m seeing a growing pattern: NIL brands built around phrases that intentionally echo well-known movie titles, characters, or pop-culture names, often through rhyme, cadence, or wordplay. They feel clever and marketable. And they often create trademark risk that isn’t obvious at first glance.

A recent precedential decision from the United States Patent and Trademark Office's (USPTO) Appeals Review Panel signals a meaningful adjustment in how those innovations are evaluated. The case—Ex parte Desjardins—does not change the law, but it clarifies how examiners must apply it ...

The start of 2026 brings energy, momentum, and predictably, the same intellectual property mistakes I see every January.

For startups, it often looks like moving fast without realizing that public launches, pitch decks, websites, and demos can quietly destroy patent rights if filings are not in place. For established companies, it usually shows up as brand expansion, new offerings, or ...