This is a "Sweet Patent"!

Well, I have covered many IP topics, Patents and Trademarks. But this one for sure is the “Sweetest Patent” to be issued. The applicant for this patent is “Sweetfields Inc.”, a family owned business, located in Southern California and deals with Crystallized edible flowers or Candied edible flowers. It is reported that USPTO will issue Sweetfields Inc. , a patent for the invention resulting in edible or non edible , non-perishable , flower derived food items which will possess improved durability, aesthetics, scent and flavor.

The patent is expected to be issued on Oct 4, 2011. You may access the patent application here.While the art of crystallizing flowers isn't novel and has been practiced by many others in the business for ages but it is reported that Sweetfields's invention will aim at improving the overall shelf life of the edible crystallized flowers and the method devised will introduce scalable process for mass production of such candied flowers.

The grant of this particular patent will definitely boost Sweetfields market growth and will bring more business to the company in the near future. All in all , it's a sweet patent, isn't! 

( Image by Rafal P.)

Are digitised book repositories infringing on Copyrights

This is a Digital age. We expect everything to be within our reach with the blink of an eye. Why books should be left behind. The new age digital books and the digital book hosting web portals have made it easier and quite accessible to reach the rarest available books with a click. But in the process, there is a possibility that the Author's moral rights and copyrights are put at stake. In a recent case, a group of International Authors have sued five US universities for copyright violations and unauthorized dissemination of digital books. The plaintiffs include the Author's Guild, Australian Society of Authors, UNEQ and other individual authors. The lawsuits have been filed against universities of Michigan, California, Wisconsin, Indiana and Cornell respectively. The plaintiffs argued that these universities obtained unauthorized scans of 7 million Copyright protected books from Google and assembled the information  in a digital repository called Hathi Trust, which holds about 9,596,083 total volumes of digitized books.

The plaintiff's complaint is made against digitization, archiving and copying which makes it a massive infringement of copyrights. On the other hand, this lawsuit could bring a severe blow to Hathi Trust's Orphan Works Project . The Orphan Works Project aims at making full- text versions of out-of-print copyrighted works available in the repository when their rights holders cannot be found or contacted. Currently around 148 potential orphan works on the HathiTrust are out-of-print titles published between 1923 and 1963.

The issue is a serious one and raises different thoughts. While proponents consider such digital book repositories as a useful resource for the students worldwide but on the contrary, it is highly unacceptable for the authors to put an orphan tag to their respective works. The situation is perplex and the pros and cons appear to be in equal proportions.Until then, we have to wait and see the outcomes in this case.

( Image by Zsuzsanna Kilian)

New Poll of the week

Following are the results for the last Poll of the week , namely : " Do you think Mobile App Patent wars are delaying further Innovations". About 40 percent of the readers voted for Yes. The rest 40 percent voted for No and the remaining 20 percent voters hold Neutral Opinion.

New Poll: " Do you think the Compulsory License granting in Pharmaceutical patents will pave way for the new Low cost generics in the developing world ". The new poll of the week could be accessed here or by scrolling down the blog page. Click your opinion.

(Image by Dominik Gwarek)