Category Archives: Uncategorized

Tom Stewart and Russel Zeid, hosts of Patent Bending on Discovery Channel Canada, and Rick Minke, their master building/industrial designer, take a look at 19th century personal safety technology in this week’s episode. The subject is a U.S. patent from … Continue reading →

Last month I reported that Discovery Channel Canada was launching a new series called Patent Bending: Mad Ideas – Modern Science. The hosts of the show, inventor Tom Stewart and science guy Russell Zeid, find wacky patents and attempt to … Continue reading →

According to the Sept. 4 issue of Business Week, the USPTO has recently banned Wikipedia as an acceptable source of information for determining the patentability of inventions. Patent examiners and applicants have been citing Wikipedia articles in patents since at … Continue reading →

Have you ever looked at a wacky patent and wondered if it really could work? Discovery Channel Canada aims to find out in a new series premiering in August called “Patent Bending: Mad Ideas and Modern Science.” The 11-episode series … Continue reading →

I’m always on the lookout for examples I can share with researchers, especially postdocs and grad students,that illustrate the pitfalls of ignoring patent literature.Here’s a recent report about two polymer researchers at the Univ. of Mass. Amherst who took theircolleagues … Continue reading →

Patent Lens, a free international patent database maintained by CAMBIA, a non-profit research institute located in Caberra, Australia, now has RSS capability. Once saved in an RSS news reader such as Bloglines, searches conducted in Patent Lens will be periodically … Continue reading →

The dates for the 4th annual IPI-ConfEx have been announced. The meeting will take place March 4-8, 2007 in Sorrento, Italy. IPI-ConfEx is organized by a board of counselers representing various patent information professional associations worldwide. The conference is an … Continue reading →

The Canadian Intellectual Property Office recently announced the availability of patent file payment histories on CD-ROM. Copies of the CD, which contains approximately 4 million payment history records from 445,000 patent documents through Dec. 31, 2005, may be obtained from … Continue reading →

Discovery Channel Canada’s Daily Planet, a news program about science and technology, recently celebrated “Invention Week.” Featured inventions included colored bubbles, aka “Zubbles”, (US2006/0004110A1) and other cool ideas from the U.S. and Canada. Aspiring inventors will find a few useful … Continue reading →

The program for the 2006 EPO Patent Information Conference, scheduled for Nov. 6-7 in Cyprus, is now online. The conference will feature technical sessions, specialized training course and an exhibition of patent information products.