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Now THERE is a question! This is a realistic concern at the start of every involved project. But how does one address this concern when it is genuinely voiced halfway through a months-long project that is succeeding and on schedule?

We live in a society where an entire family meal can be ordered from a computer and delivered piping hot to one’s front door in less than half an hour. Want a movie with that? The flick of your choosing is just a few remote clicks away and can be ready for viewing within seconds. It’s called immediate gratification and a lifestyle expectation that can unfortunately spill over into the business world as a scheduling expectation.

Intellectual Property is a wonderful field, full of discovery and change. It is what drives the world’s commerce… the guiding force behind nearly everything with a price tag. IP is a term that refers to creations of the mind: inventions, literary and artistic works, and symbols, names, images, and designs used in commerce.

IP is divided into two categories:

1) Industrial property: including inventions (patents), brands (trademarks), industrial designs, and geographic indications of source; and

2) Copyright: which includes literary and artistic works such as novels, poems and plays, films, musical works, artistic works such as drawings, paintings, photographs and sculptures, and architectural designs.

One of the popular misconceptions that I run into when I train people, is the belief that the assignment from a parent application does not need to be filed against its child continuation or divisional applications.The problem here is that there is a disconnect between the words “owner” and “title.” The word “owner” refers to a legal right of possession and the word “title” refers to the instrument that constitutes the evidence of such legal right, which is located in the ownership registry of the applicable jurisdiction in which the patent is registered.