Insider view of Nokia's patent mill

Wiley publishers has just published a book by Donal O'Connell, "Inside the Patent Factory". Its 323 pages describe the patent (churning) process at Nokia, where O'Connell works. With so many pages, it should be a useful guide to patenting at large global corporations.

THE FIRST ROTATING HOUSE TURNS 50

Tuesday's New York Times carries a nice article on Belgian independent inventor Francois Massau (1905-2002), who in 1958 built one of the first rotating houses, a patentable artistic-engineering idea becoming more popular, since such houses captures/blocks more sunlight for free heating/cooling.

PTO RESISTS ATTEMPTS TO TRADEMARK "CLOUD COMPUTING"

Last week's (Monday's) New York Times, Business Section page 1, has an article on how the PTO is fighting lame attempts by computer companies to trademark the term "cloud computing" (basically, time-sharing re-fashioned into server farms). In August, for example, the PTO rejected a trademark application from Dell, after industry experts complained that the term had become a broadly used term associated with large numbers of companies/universities, and thus could not serve as a mark to identify one random company. Microsoft has a trademark application on "live mesh" pending. The article has a picture of, and comments from, Trademark Commissioner Lynne Beresford. One statistic: 85 percent of the PTO's trademark examining attorneys work primarily from home.