Congrats go out to Beaverton, Oregon-based Digimarc Corporation, which recently entered the top 10 of The Wall Street Journal’s Patent Scorecard of leading innovators in the information technology industry.
Ranked at #9 overall, Digimarc has the highest Industry Impact score in the top 50. According to The Wall Street Journal, Industry Impact indicates the extent to which others are building upon a portfolio of issued US utility patents as compared to the total set of utility patents in the industry. As the chart below indicates, Digimarc maintains far less patents than most companies on the list, but those patents they do hold are extremely valuable.
Digimarc is a leading innovator and provider of enabling technologies that create digital identities for all forms of media and many everyday objects. Digimarc has built an extensive intellectual property portfolio with patents in digital watermarking, content identification and management, media and object discovery to enable ubiquitous computing, and related technologies.
Click image for full WSJ Patent Board.
Tomorrow, election workers are taking iPads to disabled voters who might otherwise have difficulties marking their ballots. These voters are able to pull up the ballot on the iPad and tap the screen to mark the candidate of their choice before printing out their completed ballot and send it in by mail.
Michael Jackson was more than a great singer and dancer. He was also an inventor and U.S. Patent owner. Granted in 1993 to Jackson and two partners, U.S. Patent No. 5,255,452, “Method and Means for Creating Anti-Gravity Illusion” covers a “system for allowing a shoe wearer to lean forwardly beyond his center of gravity by virtue of wearing a specially designed pair of shoes.” The shoes help create the anti-gravity illusion by hitching a heel slot in the shoes to a peg in the stage floor. The patent ended early, on Oct. 26, 2005, after failure to pay a final maintenance fee. Michael’s other legal fees may have taken precedence, or perhaps he felt there was no longer any competitive advantage to doing a “Smooth” lean. The full patent is available through the 
Nonprofits, if you have an affinity credit card program, have you checked that it meets all requirements to fall within the royalties exclusion from unrelated business income? Failure to comply can have significant tax ramifications.
Senator Wyden strongly challenges the PROTECT IP Act due to the bill’s infringement of free speech and stifling of innovation.
Oregon Intellectual Property Blog 