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Thanksgiving Day Intellectual Property

2009-11-22T03:03:39Z

This year (2009) Thanksgiving Day, a bit of a roving holiday, falls on November 26. Did you know that "MACY'S THANKSGIVING DAY PARADE" is a word mark? That's a registered trademark - Registration Number 2206890.

Food often takes center stage at Thanksgiving, and there are many well-known Thanksgiving-related products protected by patents and trademarks. One way to spend more time with family and less in the kitchen cleaning up is by using a disposable cooking pan (patent #5,628,427) or a cooking jacket (patent #4,942,809) for the turkey, ham or roast. One non-traditional, but increasingly popular, way to cook a turkey is deep-frying, and one type of equipment used in this preparation is protected by patent # 5,758,569.

Some well-known trademarks associated with turkey and dressing, must-haves at many Thanksgiving tables, are Butterball (registration #1151836) for turkey products. What holiday feast would be complete without cranberry sauce such as Ocean Spray (registration #2150919) Desserts are always the final complement to a Thanksgiving feast. For those that do not bake their own, Sara Lee's slogan for its pies and cakes, "Nobody Doesn't Like Sara Lee," is protected by a trademark (registration #1885156). Photo Credit: Erik Rank/Getty Images Illustration: Mary Bellis

Thanksgiving Day Intellectual Property originally appeared on About.com Inventors on Sunday, November 22nd, 2009 at 03:03:39.

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QVC Has Come Calling

2009-11-21T17:56:30Z

Check it out. QVC has posted a message in our forum looking for new products.

QVC Has Come Calling originally appeared on About.com Inventors on Saturday, November 21st, 2009 at 17:56:30.

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Reader Mail: Cream Cheese

2009-11-21T01:52:34Z

Marc wrote to me asking for clarification about who invented cream cheese. Marc, after a bit more research I now have a name. In 1872, cream cheese was invented by American dairymen, William Lawrence of Chester, N.Y., who accidentally developed a method of producing cream cheese while trying to reproduce a French cheese called Neufchatel.

Reader Mail: Cream Cheese originally appeared on About.com Inventors on Saturday, November 21st, 2009 at 01:52:34.

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Lock it Up... And Hide the Key

2009-11-20T16:46:20Z

UC San Diego computer scientists have built a software program that can perform key duplication without having the key. Instead, the computer scientists only need a photograph of the key.

"We built our key duplication software system to show people that their keys are not inherently secret," said Stefan Savage, the computer science professor from UC San Diego's Jacobs School of Engineering who led the student-run project. "Perhaps this was once a reasonable assumption, but advances in digital imaging and optics have made it easy to duplicate someone's keys from a distance without them even noticing."

The bumps and valleys on your house or office keys represent a numeric code that completely describes how to open your particular lock. If a key doesn't encode this precise "bitting code," then it won't open your door.

In one demonstration of the new software system, the computer scientists took pictures of common residential house keys with a cell phone camera, fed the image into their software which then produced the information needed to create identical copies. In another example, they used a five inch telephoto lens to capture images from the roof of a campus building and duplicate keys sitting on a caf� table about 200 feet away.

Lock it Up... And Hide the Key originally appeared on About.com Inventors on Friday, November 20th, 2009 at 16:46:20.

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iPatent iPod

2009-11-12T01:04:34Z

Did you know that Apple Computers has so far been unable to patent the software interface of the iPod digital music player because of a prior filing by inventor John Platt, who submitted a patent application for a similar software design in May of 2002? Photo of iPod Family provided by Apple Computers.

iPatent iPod originally appeared on About.com Inventors on Thursday, November 12th, 2009 at 01:04:34.

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Science Museum Poll Names Top Invention

2009-11-10T22:07:16Z

As part of the the London Science Museum's centenary celebration a poll was taken to determine what people felt was "the best invention ever for having made the greatest impact on the past, present and future." And the winners in order were:

X-ray machines
Penicillin
Discovery of the DNA double helix
Apollo 10 capsule
V2 Rocket Engine
Michael Jackson
Pilot ACE Computer
Steam Engine
Model T Ford
Electric Telegraph

Photo credit: LOC The first X-ray picture of the human body ever taken. PS Folks, Does anyone know how Michael Jackson got on this list?

Science Museum Poll Names Top Invention originally appeared on About.com Inventors on Tuesday, November 10th, 2009 at 22:07:16.

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Psychedelic

2009-11-10T00:55:39Z

LSD was first synthesized on November 16, 1938 by Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann in Sandoz Laboratories in Basle, Switzerland. Sandoz Laboratories, the only company to manufacture and sell LSD. first marketed the drug in 1947 under the trade name Delysid. (BTW Heroin� was once a trademark belonging to Bayer) It is interesting to note that Albert Hofmann who had been working on making a circulatory and respiratory stimulant did not realize that he had invented a hallucinogenic drug until 1943, when he accidently ingested some. Psychedelic Painting: Mary Bellis

Psychedelic originally appeared on About.com Inventors on Tuesday, November 10th, 2009 at 00:55:39.

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The History of Google - What Are You Searching For?

2009-11-08T23:15:52Z

Google was named after a googol - the name for the number 1 followed by 100 zeros - found in the book Mathematics and the Imagination by Edward Kasner and James Newman. To Google's founders the name represents the immense amount of information that a search engine has to sift through. Photo Credit: Google Co-Founders Sergey Brin & Larry Page provided by Google Inc.

The History of Google - What Are You Searching For? originally appeared on About.com Inventors on Sunday, November 8th, 2009 at 23:15:52.

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History of Nabisco

2009-10-31T18:20:06Z

In 1898, the New York Biscuit Company and the American Biscuit and Manufacturing Company merged over 100 bakeries into the National Biscuit Company, later called Nabisco. Founders Adolphus Green and William Moore, orchestrated the merger and the company quickly rose to first place in the manufacturing and marketing of cookies and crackers in America.

History of Nabisco originally appeared on About.com Inventors on Saturday, October 31st, 2009 at 18:20:06.

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How Many Things can be Made from Potatoes?

2009-10-27T07:18:25Z

The original name for french fries was "potatoes, fried in the French manner" that is how Thomas Jefferson first described the dish. Did you that Luther Burbank was granted a patent for the Idaho Potato posthumously? Or that Mr Potato Head was patented in 1952?

Photo: Rick Hall

How Many Things can be Made from Potatoes? originally appeared on About.com Inventors on Tuesday, October 27th, 2009 at 07:18:25.

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