Word: patent
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...they called the lawyers. After hiring Perkins Coie LLP, the Seattle law firm that helped Amazon.com patent its one-click buying button, Cereality sent warning letters last summer to the Cereal Bowl and Bowls, admonishing them to avoid using similar-sounding product names and slogans. Cereal Bowl fought back, sending its own warning letter to Bowls and a defiant reply to Cereality. Sensing the competitive crunch, the Cereal Cabinet shuttered and switched to Jamaican food. In March, Cereality raised the stakes, suing yet another start-up, Ohio's Cerealicious, for trademark infringement...
...Some of Cereality's patent claims may be valid," says Kenneth Rader, 24, CEO of the Cereal Bowl, "but others are ridiculous." Rader acknowledges that it would be unfair for others to copy Cereality's method of serving cereal in Chinese-food containers, but he draws the line at Cereality's attempt to lay sole claim to the idea of mixing brand-name-candy toppings with cereal...
...happy to see competitors show up to serve cereal away from home, because it adds legitimacy to the idea," he says. But when others imitate Cereality's slogans or serving buckets, Roth says his responsibility to investors requires him to fight back. And any company that files a patent application, Roth notes, is obligated by law to inform potential rivals of its prior claim...
...base--college students. A group from the University of Florida launched a "Cereal Solidarity" campaign last summer on the website freeculture.org criticizing Cereality for bullying rival restaurants with those warning letters. The protests led to an online petition--drawing hundreds of signatures--calling for an end to business-method patents and asking Cereality to withdraw its patent application. Roth says the group is more concerned with ideology than cereal toppings. "Freeculture turned Cereality into a poster child for anti-patent protest," Roth says. "We're just two guys trying to protect ourselves from big companies that could steal our intellectual...
...wasn't just thumb luck. The Cabinet Door Shop is one of 1,800 companies that use a new kind of power saw, the SawStop, that is designed to stop as soon as the blade makes contact with flesh. Its inventor, Steve Gass, an amateur woodworker and patent attorney with a Ph.D. in physics, came up with the idea in 1999. Says Gass: "I was tinkering around in my shop and looked over at my saw and thought, I wonder, if you ran your hand under the blade, if you could stop it quick enough, then you wouldn...