Indiana Inventors Association

Charles Meyer (partner, Woodard, Emhardt, Henry, Reeves & Wagner LLP) gave us a very interesting and witty review of intellectual property.   For more information than this brief summary provides, talk with someone who was there. Take-home message : Intellectual property protects your identity and your market share. The most popular forms of intellectual property are copyrights, patents, and trademarks.   A trademark brands your products with your identity.   A patent prevents others from benefiting from your invention (a product or process, an ornamental design for a manufactured product, or a plant).   A copyright prevents others from copying your particular tangible expression of an idea (not the idea itself). Trademark A trademark (for goods), service mark (for services), or trade dress (trademark for the image and overall appearance of goods) identifies you as the origin of a good or service.   It lets consumers know what quality or c...

Dave Zedonis (president, Indiana Inventors Association; principal, Z*Tech ; patentee ) treated us to a discussion on how to successfully invent and innovate. Inventing is in our genes.   It gave our ancestors the edge they needed to prosper in hostile environments and gives us hope today for a better tomorrow.   Almost everyone invents to some extent and for a variety of reasons. If you invent to make money, solve an important, widespread, and widely known problem.   Working or playing in any technical field will acquaint you with such problems.   Chatting with or surveying experts and workers in technical fields (eg, at trade shows) can do the same.   Solving such problems avoids a barrier to entering the market—the need to educate potential customers on the benefits of your invention. Stick with a problem that interests you.   Solving an important problem can easily take 3 or 4 years.   Developing a working prototype of your inventio...

Kenton Brett (granted 15 U.S. patents, see bottom of this page) displayed one of his inventions for K-5 math education and shared insights he gained from his years of innovation. Innovation takes a lot of time and money, always more than you expect. You can make things happen by sticking with an inventive project. If you think of a good idea, someone else will think of it too.  So get to the patent office and to the market first. Get unbiased validation of your idea before you spend a lot of time and money on it. You can sell just an idea, but rarely. You can get compensated for infringement of your patent by a big company.  License or sell your invention to a mid-sized company that will actively seek compensation from the big company. Get a recommendation from your potential customers. Focus on your core idea to get a cash flow that can fund the rest of your ideas. Thank you for sharing your experience with us, Mr. Brett!

Michael Stokes (CEO, Waveform Communications; author, The Waveform Model of Vowel Perception and Production ) summarized his progress since 2012 in developing a method of using waveforms and spectrograms to identify vowels in human speech. Mr. Stokes’ model is currently the best for describing how people recognize spoken vowels.   A distinct set of vowels characterizes each language.   For example, English has ten vowels, Spanish five.   Each vowel of a language has a characteristic sound that underlies all dialects and individual pronunciations.   That characteristic sound can be visualized as spectrograms of three sound wave frequencies.   Although unpatentable as is (patent applications 14/223304 and 13/241780 ), a computer program (Elbow) based on the model accurately predicts spoken vowels from observations of the spectrograms.   A second program (Cobweb), especially useful to athletes, uses speech patterns to diagnose concussions in re...

I knew that a country without a patent office and good patent laws was just a crab, and couldn't travel any way but sideways or backways. —Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court A patent helps to secure a place in the market for an invention.   That is why many inventors take time, make an effort, and pay a significant amount of money to patent their inventions. Inventors often do not realize that grant of a U.S. patent is always conditional.   Like everyone else, patent examiners make mistakes.   The patent office (Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB)) or a federal court can decide at any time during the life of a patent that the patent should never have been granted.   The result is an invalidated patent that provides no benefit to the patent owner. Truth is often hard to ascertain and reasonable individuals can disagree on what the truth is.   Does our current patent system provide enough certainty for individual inventors a...

Need help with designing or with building a prototype of your invention?   Or with preparing drawings for a patent application? Wade Stallings (owner, D3DTechnologies ; (463) 201-1777, d3dtechnologies@gmail.com ) in Indianapolis can help.   Using computer-aided design (SolidWorks and other CAD software) and 3-D printing with hard plastics (0.02 mm tolerances, each part as big as 8 inches high with a 7 inch x 7 inch base), Mr. Stallings (a recent graduate of Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology) provides these services for $60/hour, usually with a maximum of 4 hours/project.   The total price of a project depends on the time/project and on the type and amount of plastic used in building a prototype.   Included in the price are a confidentiality agreement, all project files (CAD, pdf, etc.), and assignment of any and all patent rights to the client.