Word: patentable
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...comers. This year it will boost its trade with the Soviet Union by 60%, yet receive $600 million in foreign investment from the U.S. Its foreign trade will exceed $40 billion, ten times as much as in 1968. To accommodate Western firms, Peking has passed new tax and patent laws. "We're talking megabucks," says a Washington official who has handled trade with China for several years. "American oil companies will be in China for the next 50 years...
Japan is fighting American software on another front. The powerful Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) wants to see software treated as industrial property covered by patent law, which allows for only 15 years of protection. The U.S. Government argues that software is intellectual property and should be protected for up to 50 years under copyright treaties. Mill is also pushing for an arbitration system, in which software developers could be legally obliged to make certain products available to competitors if the product is considered "highly useful to the public interest." U.S. officials are extremely wary of the arbitration...
What all this was was the twelfth annual National Inventors Conference, sponsored by the Patent and Trademark Office, the National Council of Patent Law Associations, and the Bureau of National Affairs. It was held in one of those futuristic hotels-the Marriott Crystal Gateway-and in the Patent and Trademark building. Seventy of the nation's inventors paid $75 apiece to attend workshops (Inventing in Today's World, Funding a New Idea) and to take part in an exposition of inventions. A touching sidelight was a tour of the patent offices...
...elderly woman, whose patents on three kitchen gadgets ("Slices vegetables so thin there was a little old lady in Atlantic City who made a tomato last all summer long!") have expired, inquired of Patent Examiner Elizabeth J. Curtin, "What if the building burns down...
Later, happening across a computer screen, the knot of inventors being guided by Examiner Curtin asked if she could summon up their names. Roughly 4.4 million patents have been issued, and they are slowly being fed, the latest ones first, into the Patent Office's new computers. So the inventors whose patents go back a few years, and these were the ones with Examiner Curtin, were not yet in the system. It seemed to hurt them not to get authentic Government computer proof of their achievements. "If I gave you the name of the product, could you bring...