Our speaker on Thursday Sept. 25 will be Karen Deak, who runs the University of Notre Dame Patent Law program.  She will be speaking about IP or intellectual property, specifically about patents which are the tools used to safeguard IP.  Plan to meet in 235 NSH 9-10 am (I’ll see if I can get the larger 230 NSH room, but no guarantees…)

And here is your “homework”:  go to http://www.google.com/patents/US6355623. A real patent!   On the right hand side of the page, you’ll see a section titled “Claims”;  this is the section where the inventors list exactly what the Patent Office should protect as their discovery.  What exactly do the inventors claim to have invented here? Is it a device?  Is it a way of using the device?  Is it a state of matter?  How does their invention help solve the problem described in the background to the patent? Karen wants you to translate Claim 1 into English.  You may need to read elsewhere in the patent to discover what some of the terms in Claim 1 mean and why they’re important as intellectual property.  

See you Thursday morning!