Support for LAist comes from
Become a sponsor
Audience-funded nonprofit news
Donate
Stay Connected

LAist is part of Southern California Public Radio, a member-supported public media network.

Audience-funded nonprofit news
Listen
Donate
Podcasts Take Two
What do new US patent laws mean for inventors?
solid orange rectangular banner
()
Take Two Logo
Mar 13, 2013
Listen • 7:38
What do new US patent laws mean for inventors?
If you were to invent a viable alternative to an e-book, you might want to patent it. For the past 200 years, that patent filing process has remained pretty much unchanged, but this Saturday the system is shifting from first to invent to first to file.
U.S. President Barack Obama visits a classroom and watches students Meghan Clark and Nathan Hughes (R) demonstrate the FIRST Robot, a robot created in the school’s prototyping and robotics senior research labs for last year’s FIRST Robotics Competition, at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology September 16, 2011 in Alexandria, Virginia. Later in the morning Obama signed the America Invents Act, which reforms patent law so to give a patent to the first applicant rather than the first inventor and allows the woefully underfunded U.S. Patent and Trade Office to set and potentially keep its own fees.
U.S. President Barack Obama visits a classroom and watches students Meghan Clark and Nathan Hughes (R) demonstrate the FIRST Robot, a robot created in the school’s prototyping and robotics senior research labs for last year’s FIRST Robotics Competition, at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology September 16, 2011 in Alexandria, Virginia. Later in the morning Obama signed the America Invents Act, which reforms patent law so to give a patent to the first applicant rather than the first inventor and allows the woefully underfunded U.S. Patent and Trade Office to set and potentially keep its own fees.
(
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
)

If you were to invent a viable alternative to an e-book, you might want to patent it. For the past 200 years, that patent filing process has remained pretty much unchanged, but this Saturday the system is shifting from first to invent to first to file.

If you were to invent a viable alternative to an e-book, you might want to patent it. For the past 200 years, that patent filing process has remained pretty much unchanged, but this Saturday the system is shifting from first to invent to first to file.

Even though patent law doesn't sound like the most exciting topic, it will undoubtedly change how you protect your next life changing billion dollar invention.

Eric Talley, professor of law and the faculty co-director of the Berkeley Center for Law Business and the Economy, joins the show with more.