Beer Trademarks for Beer Bike

 Beer Bike 2023 is almost upon us! What is, for many, Rice's biggest annual event is this Saturday, April 1st. Let's get into the spirit with some brewery trademarks from alumni businesses.

We'll start with the mot obvious choice, Houston's oldest microbrewery started by a pair of alumni, Brock Wagner (1987) and Kevin Bartol (1981): Saint Arnold. They own 9 live and currently registered marks. Most important of these is the word mark for the name Saint Arnold, registration no. 1886695. Registered in 1995, it is the principle trademark and lists beer, ales, porters and stouts under goods and services. See all the documentation for it here.

The other 8 marks are similarly word marks, mostly the names of their signatures brews like Lawnmower, Santo, or Art Car IPA. Two more are in the process of application--Tarnation (serial no. 97580003) and Hop Spring (serial no. 97764336). Finally, there's One Pot Showdown, no. 4443043, registered in 2013, a service mark for "organizing and conducting food and cooking competitions".

I am slightly disappointed that Saint Arnold has no design marks registered, like the iconic (pun intended) image of Saint Arnold holding a beer, hand gesturing towards a Texas shaped sun.

Buffalo Bayou Brewing Co., much more recently established by alum Rassul Zarinfar (2004), owns quite a few beer marks! I was pleased to find a design mark, the brewery's logo with a buffalo against the skyline: 

Buffalo Bayou, registration no. 5001182

 

 

It is the primary service mark for their brew pub, registered in 2016.

Buffalo Bayou also has 6 live word marks, each one for an individual beer. Those include their first trademark from 2012, 1836, registration no. 4212512.

Rather surprisingly, there is no word mark or even a trademarked design for the brewery itself, just the service mark.

Finally, Strike Brewing Co., which is not in Houston but San Jose, CA. Owned by Jenny Lewis (2005), Strike has 2 trademarks on file. Only one is live, the word mark for Strike Brewing Co., registration no. 4188098, 2012. View more about that mark here. 

Their dead mark is a design for a brew:

Dead Strike Brewing mark, registration no. 4188097

Strike Brewing Co. Wit Belgian Style Wheat design trademark was applied and registered at the same time as the general word mark, but cancelled or invalidated in 2019. Learn more about why at the TSDR here. 

CounterCommon Beerworks and Kitchen (Dennis Rhee, 2007,  and Jaime Robles, 2006) and Southern Yankee Beer Co. (Alex Porter, 2018) where are your marks? I didn't find anything. If you need any help with trademark searching or preparation, come see us!

Women Inventors of 1990s Rice

Happy Women's History Month! March has a number of interesting national days and dedications, but women's history is among the most prominent, and perhaps even important.

This blog celebrates some of the leading women in Rice's early(-ish*) history of patents and inventors. Rice's first surge in patenting university research/inventions took place in the 1990s. While there is definitely a direct relationship to the work of Dr. Smalley, several women made their own significant contributions. 

First, Dr. Alemka Kisic, formerly of the Biosciences department. She is the first woman inventor credited on a Rice-assigned patent, in 1990. She, along with three others, invented US 4,897,475: Process for synthesis of 5α-cholest-8(14)-en-3/β-ol-15-one and other 15-oxygenated sterols. 

Molecular diagrams from US Patent 4,897,475

Dr. Kisic was even more influential outside her role as inventor. Rice annually awards the Dr. Alemka Kisic Distinguished Staff Service Award from the Department of Biochemistry and Cell Biology "in recognition of exceptional leadership and devoted service" to two department members. 

Dr. Linda Torczon is the second woman on a Rice-assigned patent. She and three others invented US 5,249,295: Digital computer register allocation and code spilling using interference graph coloring.

Process flowchart from US Patent 5,249,295

In addition, Dr. Torczon earned all three of her degrees from Rice during the 1980s, and has been a part of the computer science department since 1985. Dr. Torczon's impressive dedication and loyalty to Rice computer science is paired with her outreach efforts focused on increasing the representation and presence of women and underrepresented minorities in science, especially computer sciences.  

The third woman credited on a Rice-owned patent is Dr. Laura Suggs, who worked on a Rice-owned patent while studying for her Ph.D. in chemical engineering, which was awarded in 1998. She was the lead inventor on US 5,644,005: Method of making poly(propylene fumarate-coethylene oxide). 

Molecular diagrams from US Patent 5,644,005

Presently, Dr. Suggs holds UT's biomedical engineering department's Zarrow Centennial Professorship in Engineering. She is a credited inventor on other patents, such as US 6,355,755, granted in 2002.

The last female inventor on a Rice-owned patent from the 1990s is Dr. Yildiz Bayazitoglu, lead inventor of US 5,887,018: Longitudinal electromagnetic levitator. 

Schematic representation of magnetic flux density from US Patent 5,887,018

Dr. Bayazitoglu was the inventor on an earlier patent, US 5,527,136: Mono-tripod platform, but it is assigned to the Halliburton Company. She also is credited as an inventor on two later patents issued to Rice, US 7,323,136 and US 8,034,134, which can be found in the Digital Scholarship Archive patent repository. 

She is still Rice's Harry S. Cameron Professor in Mechanical Engineering.

Pi Day Inventions

Happy Pi Day! March 14 is known as Pi Day because 3.14 are the same first three digits as the mathematical constant pi, or π. (Because it is an irrational number and this blog will not be more specific than 3.14, here's a site with the first million digits.) 

For this year's Pi Day celebration, we are sharing some patents that use the number/mathematical constant, its concept, or the Greek letter's shape.

1. US 4,643,504 Lampholder assembly for loop-, u-, or pi-shaped gas discharge or fluorescent lamps with a single lamp cap. This one is more based on the shape of the letter pi, and uses that modified U-shape to describe part of a unique lamp. There's very little to do with the number pi, but because the letter is more commonly used than others from the Greek alphabet, the inventor used it as a descriptor that would be familiar to many.

   

   Fig. 4 seemed the most pi-shaped
   

2. US 9,444,065 π-conjugated heavy-metal polymers for organic white-light-emitting diodes. Evidently, π can also refer to an orbital of an atom, and its conjugation means it has alternating single and multiple bonds. That actually means very little to me, a person without an advanced knowledge or understanding of chemistry, so if that description is incorrect, my apologies. Please comment with a better explanation. For this invention, it refers to chemical composition and formulation rather than the number or constant. 
3. US 9,551,094 Fiber preform of π-shaped section, in particular for a fan platform made of composite material. This refers to a fan blade in an turbine engine for aviation. So there is a part of an airplane engine (maybe) that is in the shape of pi, which uses fibers to... Maybe read the patent if you understand enough about aircraft engineering.

   

   A close-up of how the fiber should be woven to form a π shape
   

   
   

   

   The fiber preformed section in a fan platform

   
   

   
   

   
   

4. US 11,161,381 Self-propelled robotic lawnmower comprising wheels arranged with a negative camber angle. π as a number and mathematical constant was used in this one! The Swedish inventors used it in a classic formula to calculate the circumference of circular wheels.

   

   Need a circumference for part 5.1? Use π

   
   

Rice's European Patents

Let's talk about the patents that Rice University owns that were granted in Europe. Little attention has been paid to these in the past, to the point that one might be surprised to learn Rice owns patents in Europe.

At present, there are 5 active patents assigned to Rice by the European Patent Office (EPO), according to Lens.org.

Among them, the most recently granted was EP 3,033,346 B1, Derivatives of Uncialamycin, Methods of Synthesis and Their Use as Antitumor Agents. Granted January 8, 2020, it was invented by a team of 6 inventors (Kyriacos C. Nicolaou, Min Lu, Debashis Mandal, Sanjeev Gangwar, Naidu S. Chowdari, and Yam B. Poudel) and co-owned by Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. and The Scripps Research Institute. The same patent is also filed with the USPTO, under the same title, and the applications were submitted on the same day. However, there were three patents granted by the USPTO stemming from the first application set: US 9,777,013; US 10,233,192; and US 10,889,590. 

EP 3,033,346: Derivatives of Uncialamycin, Methods of Synthesis and their Use as Antitumor Agents

There is nothing obvious about these five inventions indicating why Rice pursued their ownership in the EU. Only one, EP 2,753,733 B1, Carbon Nanotubes Fiber Having Low Resistivity, High Modulus and/or High Thermal Conductivity and a Method of Preparing Such Fibers by Spinning Using a Fiber Spin-Dope, is co-owner or co-invented by an entity or people located in Europe. In that case, half the invention team and Conyar B.V. are from the Netherlands. 

EP 2,753,733: Carbon Nanotubes Fiber Having Low Resistivity, High Modulus and/or High Thermal Conductivity and a Method of Preparing Such Fibers by Spinning Using a Fiber Spin-Dope

The other four are either co-owned by American entities or Rice entirely. Perhaps there are commercial interests abroad that aren't obvious in a patent.

Expanding results to include expired patents doesn't really increase our results; evidently there are only two more EPO Rice patents. None of them were filed before 1998, and that one expired patent is an outlier by about 4-5 years. A few more results pop up if applications are included, but again the increase is minimal.

EXPIRED! Hemoglobin Mutants with Reduced Nitric Oxide Scavenging

With so few EPO patents, past, present, and potential, we simply must conclude Rice doesn't have much interest in owner European IP.