David Kappos, Director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office, recently announced that the USPTO and Google, Inc. have entered into a two year agreement.  According to the arrangement, the USPTO will provide Google with its existing bulk patent and trademark public data. Google will host the approximately 10 terabytes of data, without modification, on its website at no cost. Currently, one can retrieve patent grants and published applications, trademark applications, TTAB proceedings, and assignments from the site.

Previously, bulk data only could be retrieved from the USPTO on DVDs for a fee. The bulk, machine readable format offered through Google allows IP groups to analyze the data to determine trends at no cost. In addition, the agreement provides the USPTO time to strategically transact with a contractor who has the technical abilities to retrieve and distribute bulk data from the USPTO.

Now that we have discussed how a company can protect their content during development we should look at the next logical part of protecting one’s products: content protection during production.

The first step is ensuring that you know your manufacturers and can trust their own internal security measures. Most product leaks occur because someone at a replication facility made a copy of the product and spread it via the internet. Do not be afraid to investigate and ask questions before outsourcing. One solution to the risks of outsourcing is to keep as much production possible done internally. For every link in the chain you add (in terms of outside production) you increase the risk of your products being pirated and you not being able to track down the potential source and limit damage.

This leads us to the second step: tracking your products during production. If you have to outsource your production (and even if you handle your production internally) you should be able to track who is doing what during the production phase and when they are doing it. While people can gain access to a console or a locked drawer, the logging of products can help reduce the risk by simply making it harder for people and increasing the likelihood that they will be caught. New products are being developed that allow for a digital watermark that is unseen to the human eye and for low costs too, which makes tracking people even easier. In short making sure you know and trust your manufacturers and keeping track of your products during production are two key steps to preventing piracy of your company’s products.

Yes, this is the real deal.  According to the National Counterterroism center’s website, “[t]his edition, like others since the Calendar was first published in a daily planner format in 2003, contains useful information across a wide range of terrorism-related topics: terrorist groups, wanted terrorists, and technical pages on various threat-related issues. The Calendar marks dates according to the Gregorian and Islamic calendars, and contains significant dates in terrorism history, as well as dates that terrorists may believe are important when planning ‘commemoration-style” attacks.’

The Harvard Journal of Law & Technology has announced its new “Digest”site.  The HJOLT editors tell us the Digest will contain “short articles on recent developments in areas such as patents, copyright, biotechnology, telecommunications and cyberlaw.” Looks promising.