Perpetual Innovation

Category: intellectual property

  • IP for Corn that fertilizes itself with Nitrogen Fixing bacteria.

    From SustainZine: Corn that fertilizes itself with Nitrogen Fixing bacteria. How best to propagate the innovation & commercialize it. #SustainZine #RegenerativeFarming
    http://sustainzine.com/2018/08/corn-that-fertilizes-itself-with.html
    *** Blog Article ***
    This is a cool article in Science by Ed Young about a giant corn varietal in Sierra Mixe Mexico that grows in very poor soil, but actually fertilizes itself. There’s a bacteria that grows around the roots that absorbs nitrogen from the air and provides it to the corn. The team of researchers led by Alan Bennett from UC Davis referred to this a “Nitrogen Fixing” which works just like roots absorbing nitrogen from the soil.
    In this case, the soil is very poor quality, so the corn actually gathers nitrogen from the air (78% nitrogen for dry air).
    One major disadvantage of this corn is that it takes 8 months to mature.
    The benefits are many. In a linear world of farming, row crops are raise on big farms and the crop shipped off to marked (cities), which deplete the soil. So fertilizers are needed to replenish the soil to grow the next crop. The fertilizers (mainly phosphate and nitrogen) end up running off into the water ways and result in massive ecological damage such as algae blooms and red tide.
    Because fertilizers are expensive to buy, and expensive to apply, farmers continue to do a better job with fertilizers. (Other factors like urbanization, turf grass and golf course are taking over lead positions in pollution generation.)   However, linear systems in farming are non-sustainable, broken systems, compared to Regenerative Farming approaches that use non-til and corp rotations to restore the quality of the soil.
    To commercialize this “nitrogen fixing” cereal crop requires some improvements, new varietals (sexual reproduction) or genetically engineered (GMO crops). The intellectual Property (IP) of such crops will be important. Profits and the capitalist system at work, availability to the people and countries that need it, and the property rights protections that make IP work are just a few important ingredients in the dissemination of new technology — in this case, new crops.

  • Corn that fertilizes itself with Nitrogen Fixing bacteria.

    This is a cool article in Science by Ed Young about a giant corn varietal in Sierra Mixe Mexico that grows in very poor soil, but actually fertilizes itself. There’s a bacteria that grows around the roots that absorbs nitrogen from the air and provides it to the corn. The team of researchers led by Alan Bennett from UC Davis referred to this a “Nitrogen Fixing” which works just like roots absorbing nitrogen from the soil.
    In this case, the soil is very poor quality, so the corn actually gathers nitrogen from the air (78% nitrogen for dry air).
    One major disadvantage of this corn is that it takes 8 months to mature.
    The benefits are many. In a linear world of farming, row crops are raise on big farms and the crop shipped off to marked (cities), which deplete the soil. So fertilizers are needed to replenish the soil to grow the next crop. The fertilizers (mainly phosphate and nitrogen) end up running off into the water ways and result in massive ecological damage such as algae blooms and red tide.
    Because fertilizers are expensive to buy, and expensive to apply, farmers continue to do a better job with fertilizers. (Other factors like urbanization, turf grass and golf course are taking over lead positions in pollution generation.)   However, linear systems in farming are non-sustainable, broken systems, compared to Regenerative Farming approaches that use non-til and corp rotations to restore the quality of the soil.
    To commercialize this “nitrogen fixing” cereal crop requires some improvements, new varietals (sexual reproduction) or genetically engineered (GMO crops). The intellectual Property (IP) of such crops will be important. Profits and the capitalist system at work, availability to the people and countries that need it, and the property rights protections that make IP work are just a few important ingredients in the dissemination of new technology — in this case, new crops.

  • Taking Liberty, A $3.5m copyright stamp of mistaken identity

    Putting the Status of Liberty on a US stamp seems like a no brainer, send someone out to take an original picture of miss liberty, stamp it and run. Or, get full rights to a picture, modify it to your hearts content — maybe make her happier to be holding up so well after most of a century in the New York weather! (Maybe add a Mono Lisa Smile!?)… But, often, copyrights may not be as simple as they appear.
    Rick Kurnit has a great blog about a copyright for the Status of Liberty stamp on Lexology.
    Here’s the backstory. The US Post Office got a picture of a Status of Liberty, but not THE Status of Liberty. It is a picture of the replica (although Lady Liberty is smaller, mind you) in Las Vegas.
    “Robert Davidson, the artist who created the model, upon seeing the stamp (after his wife came home from the post office and exclaimed ‘they put our statue on a stamp’) registered the copyright in his version of the statue and sued.”
    After 5 years and a 2 week trial… Davidson won $3.5m+. That’s a lot of forever stamps. Talk about making it BIG in Vegas!
    Kurnit takes the time to make this a learning moment by discussion the use of copyrighted materials, and even derivative works.
    You would kind of think that anything publicly owned and publicly viewable link the Statue of Liberty would be, well, public domain, including the photos thereof. Not so. (Generally, I own my photos, and the derivative works of those photos.)

  • Maria Pallante out of Copyright. Unified IP?

    Maria Pallante: out of Copyright Office

    Great article by Dennis Crouch over at Patently-O. (But then aren’t they all great over there.)

    Apparently Pallante is out as Chief of the Copyright office. And the clamor is up as to why we don’t have a unified IP at the patent and trademark office, kind of a US PTOC. (I guess that would be pronounced Pea-Talk, or PeeTalk, if you wanted to talk dirty.)

    Back in 2012, Crouch recommended creating an integrated US Intellectual Property Organization, or USIPO (you sip oh) akin to WIPO for the world of IP.

    The argument for an integrated IP approach “…  is that many operating businesses relying upon intellectual property (IP) rights typically do not focus on a single form of IP rights but instead take a layered approach that includes some combination of patent, trademark, copyright, contractual, employment, trade secret, and design rights, for instance.”

    With all the changes happening, or potentially happening, in the IP world this integration seems like a great idea when the time has come.

    Let’s go with USIPO, not PTOC, on this one.

    ‘via Blog this’

  • Busted, or not busted, our patent system

    One of the most revered, trusted and enduring of America’s industrial and technological advantages is our patent system.  Except that, it isn’t anymore.  Patents are included in the US Constitution, proof positive that the Foundering Fathers considered them critically important to the future of the country.  That was then, this is now and you’ll understand when you go to www.wired.com/2015/01/fixing-broken-patent-system.  It was written by Jay Walker,the founder of Priceline in the late 1990s.

    Here is an insightful chronology of how much the patent system benefited the country up until the last several decades.  The system is now too cumbersome and costly such that 95% (Walker’s data) of inventions are not available to small and medium size businesses.  Only the mega corporations have the human, financial and technological resources to fully utilize the system.  A study is cited stating that liberating the patent system from litigation-based costs and risks would create $200B/yr in increased economic output.
    Although Hall & Hinkelman (2015) in the Patent Primer 3.0 boast of Intellectual Property, mainly patents, as one of “the great equalizers of our lifetime”, not all companies who use patents are equally able to capitalize on them.
    References

    Hall, E. B. & Hinkelman, R. M. (2015). Perpetual Innovation™: Patent primer 3.0: Patents, the great equalizer of our time! An overview of intellectual property for inventors and entrepreneurs.  Morrisville, NC: LuLu Press. ISBN: 978-1-329-17833-5  Retrieved from: http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/SBPlan

    Hall, E. B. & Hinkelman, R. M. (2015). Perpetual Innovation™: Patent primer 3.0e: Patents, the great equalizer of our time! An overview of intellectual property with patenting cost estimates for inventors and entrepreneurs.  [Amazon Kindle eBook].  ASIN: B010ISU7ZG