Understanding IP Matters

Send us Fan Mail The New York Times once ran a monthly patents column every Saturday morning. Today, most reporters covering intellectual property cannot tell a patent from a trademark. Bruce Berman sits down with Gene Quinn, patent attorney, educator, and host of IP Watchdog Unleashed, and Eli Mazour, patent attorney at Foley and Lardner and host of Clause 8, two of the most listened to voices in IP media, to talk about why patent and copyright rights are harder to explain today than ever, w...

Send us Fan Mail Some startups have filed 300 patents in every country in the world and still ended up in bankruptcy court, unable to sell a single one. Efrat Kasznik, president of Foresight Valuation Group and an IP management instructor at Stanford Business School, returns to Understanding IP Matters to explain why patent counts alone no longer impress sophisticated investors, and what does. Bruce Berman talks with Kasznik about the exit bottleneck trapping roughly 1,300 unicorns, why softw...

Send us Fan Mail In Spider-Man 2002, newspaper editor J. Jonah Jameson shouts an iconic line: "Run down to the patent office, copyright the name "Green Goblin." I want a quarter every time someone says it." But here's the thing... that's not how copyrights work. Even smart, engaged people mix up basic IP concepts, and that confusion has real economic consequences. Corey Salsberg, Vice President and Global Head of IP Affairs at Novartis, joins Bruce Berman to unpack why intellectu...

Send us Fan Mail America built its patent office before it had paved roads in its own capital, and that decision still shapes how invention works today. Bruce Berman is joined by Eric Hintz, an invention historian at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History, for a conversation that traces the roots of the U.S. patent system back to the Constitutional Convention and forward through the rise of corporate research labs. Hintz explains why the framers designed a patent sy...

Send us Fan Mail Character licensing is a $370 billion global industry — and most people have never heard of it. Bruce Berman sits down with David Born, CEO of Born Licensing and one of the world's leading experts in character and IP licensing for advertising. From placing Buddy the Elf in a UK supermarket ad to helping Geico license Angry Birds, David breaks down how brands use intellectual property to create instant emotional recognition in marketing campaigns. He explains how licensing dea...