Intellectual Property: Additional Reading

What would be the point of creating, producing, or inventing something if another person can steal or market your idea or your company's trade secret? Author Rich Stim, a lawyer as well as a musician and author of creative works, offers this trusted, comprehensive resource. It's for creators, entrepreneurs, and business people to keep on their shelf for when they need understandable explanations of how U.S. laws on patents, copyrights, and trademark protect their work. The book provides not only basic legal overviews but detailed application filing instructions.

Trademarks, the names and symbols that identify your business, brand and products in the marketplace, are important assets that you need to choose carefully and vigilantly protect-especially in cyberspace. Online competitors around the world can profit from your good name, unless you act now and protect your brand equity.
With Trademark, the comprehensive Nolo handbook used by small business owners, lawyers, artists and Netheads, you get the most up-to-date information you need to defend your creations.

Copyright law was once an esoteric backwater, the special province of professional authors, publishers, and media companies. This is no longer the case. In the age of social media and cloud storage, we have become a copying and sharing culture. Much of our everyday communication, work, and entertainment now directly involves copyright law. Copyright law and policy are ferociously contested. Record labels, movie studios, book publishers, newspapers, and many authors rage that those who share music, video, text, and images over the Internet are'stealing'their property. By contrast, copyright industry critics celebrate digital technology's potential to make the universe of movies, music, books, and art accessible anytime and anywhere - and to empower individuals the world over to express themselves by sharing and remixing those works. These critics argue that excessive copyright enforcement threatens that promise and stifles creativity. In Copyright: What Everyone Needs to Know?, Neil Netanel explains the concepts needed to understand the heated debates about copyright law and policy. He identifies the combatants, unpacks their arguments, and illuminates what is at stake in the debates over copyright's present and future.

Economic research shows that small businesses are the primary driver of job creation in the United States. Yet, the capacity of American small businesses to create jobs is at risk. American firms compete and grow by supplying products and services that consumers demand, and by internationalizing their businesses through licensing, franchising, or exporting. For many small companies, patent protection prevents competitors from simply copying their innovations, and aids in attracting investor capital needed to grow, build market share, and create jobs. The aim of this book is to show how the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, in coordination with other Federal departments and agencies, can best support businesses with international patent protection. Moreover, upon its signing in 2011, the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act (AIA) substantially overhauled U.S. patent law. Included in AIA was the expansion of the prior user rights defense to infringement and broadening the classes of patents that are eligible for the new limited prior user rights defense. (Here, prior user rights, is a defense to patent infringement afforded to a party that was commercially using, or engaged in substantial preparations for commercial use of, an invention later patented by another party). In the debate about the impact of an expanded prior user rights defense on the patent system and innovation more generally, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office produced a report detailing its findings and recommendations on the operation of prior user rights in the industrialized world, which is discussed further in this book.