Brands as International Currency: How to Effectively Manage Brand Migration

In today’s global and social media driven world, brands have become the currency of international trade. For in-house counsel, high quality brands provide a bond of trust with your client’s consumers. Ensuring that your client’s brands are legally secure and high quality is challenging. This is an issue all in-house counsel face. It is particularly challenging in the case of brand migration. Brand migration is the process of moving the association of goodwill from one brand owner to another, or from one brand to another. This can be achieved through the substitution of one brand for another over a period…

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Are You an Inventor?

  Determining inventorship is an important step of the patent application process. Are you an inventor? Is your co-worker an inventor? Is your supervisor an inventor? Under United States patent law, an inventor is an individual, or for a joint invention, the individuals collectively who invented or discovered the subject matter of an invention. However, what does it mean to invent or discover the subject matter of the invention? An invention generally involves a mental act and a physical act. That is, the mental act, i.e., conceiving of the subject matter of the invention, and the physical act, i.e., reducing…

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