The Trademark Olympics!

Like any big sporting association, the international Olympic games own many marks. In fact, there are so many Olympic committees and associations it's almost impossible to do a search for Olympic trademarks. Do I search for something international or just in the US? And who really owns the concept? 

Truly, I had no idea when I started this, and my ignorance of the legal and organizational scope of the Olympics really only became clear as I tried to find official Olympics trademarks.

"But surely," I told myself, "someone must own that interconnected rings symbol or everyone would put all over everything."

Yeah, they do. And apparently it's everyone who has ever participated in an Olympic Games. I truly did not expect to be so overwhelmed by such a seemingly simple search premise. I think it is due to one culprit in particular, too.

Anyway, here are some Olympic symbols and their owners:  

The above-mentioned culprit! Canada's Canadian Olympic Committee went WAY overboard registering  their marks... in Canada. I did not find that they had registered so many in any other jurisdiction. Also, for all of the registrations that I pulled, they claimed every single class. Seriously! Nice classes 1-45 completely. Either CIPO was feeling lenient towards the Canadian Olympic Committee or they have pretty open ideas about classes of goods and services. 

ALL THE CLASSES (except it can only show 33; note the comma)

This particular mark is one of their committee's symbols. It was registered in 1975, and according to the WIPO Global Brand Database, is still live. 

The Canadian Olympic Association logo, since 1975

The United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee has many registrations in the USPTO database, but it doesn't have them like Canada. This one is for branding some random souvenirs. Still, it's likely just one of many similar logos that is used for multiple purposes and you've likely seen this past week.

Team USA!

I accidentally closed the window with this information about this registered mark, and given how overwhelmed I've felt about this search, thought I would never find it again. But allow me to introduce you to the image search function in the Global Brand Database sometime.

Both color and grayscale, just in case

It's for the British Olympic Association and covers a handful of expected and (probably also) souvenir-related classes. It doesn't seem to be the main symbology, though; that's a lion or lion head. 

The British were not my first guess when I saw this

The Qatar Olympic Committee is another that has worked hard to cover all potential infringement bases. They've registered this symbol in more countries than you might guess. I did not know the name of the IP office in Zimbabwe before this afternoon, but now I do. In this particular case, the image and the related record is from Tunisia, another IP office I was previously unfamiliar with.

I like how it's the ring colors but people

Finally, here is the recognizable international Olympic Games symbol, from the International Olympic Committee (Comité International Olympique) based in Switzerland. The specific registration is with the EPO.

International registration for international committees!

Enjoy the Olympics while they are still taking place, and we'll revisit this IP again in a few years.

Let's Get Cooking

The husband was watching this video on YouTube, and he called my attention to it at 22 seconds, because patents are referenced.

There's nothing wrong with searching patents for recipes, I bet many PTRC librarians have!

My first reaction: "This guy sucks at patent searches! Finding an English version of a Korean patent is super easy. I bet he missed all kinds of results!"

And then I thought that perhaps I should just try it myself, because why not find patented methods for cooking that rely on unusual methods? It sounds like there may be some interesting material out there, and I'd really like to see what the Korean patent is all about anyway.

As it turns out, it's no wonder this YouTuber did not focus much on the Korean patent. It's a very short, Korean issued only patent that barely describes a meat cooking method. The title is actually omitted. So it's not so much that he can't cook in Korean, as it is that he would have just had to pick a method of heating and then some form of flavoring from a list, and then used whatever meat desired. It's an extremely unsatisfying patent for a lot of reasons. 

Exceedingly minimal info on how to cook your meat.

I decided to just look for some meat cooking patents, since general cooking could include a distressingly long list of results. I've searched for food and cookery patents before; if you don't limit ingredients, it's overwhelming. After a few tweaks to my query and organizing the results, I found a few interesting options. 

Many were for meat cooking equipment. I chose not to focus on exclude those, because they aren't really recipes. With that in mind, here are the best (or at least most noteworthy), genuinely patented methods for cooking your meat!

1. Right off the bat I'm breaking my rules with patent 2,636,431: Device for Cooking Meat and Toasting Buns. I had to include it because the bun toasting in the same device caught my attention. Although I can hardly tell what is taking place in the diagrams, I have to assume it isn't just setting the buns on a heated surface. After all, this is a rotisserie for ground meat (???) and the buns are supposed to catch dripping juices (?!?!?!?!) while toasting, but not burning. Read the whole patent and description here.

   

   Toast yer buns!
   

2. Patent 5,662,959 is for steam cooking of meats, which is supposed to prevent the loss of any water or moisture. Everyone is so concerned with retaining juices! I saw a lot of that in the patents. I'm starting to suspect that my own lack of experience with cooking meat--especially on grills--is affecting my perspective. 
3. The Art of Cooking Hams, US 1,214,627: Because some people recognize that when you cook a ham, it isn't just a task, or industry, it's an art. Since I personally dislike ham, I can't really say if this is accurate... But if it's patented, I guess it's plausible. 

   

   How to create culinary art via porcine means
   

4. You're not supposed to ask about the process or ingredients, but someone had to describe it in detail for it to be patented. Read US 3,068,104 Preparation of Sausage at your own risk.
5. This invention is an overly complicated (in my opinion) method of imparting the unique flavor achieved through cooking meat by exposing it to heated wood. It requires one-time use thin sheets of wood. That seems like quite a manufacturing burden, but perhaps when US 2,423,964 was filed, it was not. The diagrams illustrate a surprising breadth of possible variations, too. 

   

   Impart a delicate, woody flavor to your meat
   

6. Need a constant minimum cooking time for a specific kind of animal? Patent 3,908,035 Method of Roasting Meat is a device that provides just such a thing! Select the meat variety, weight, and whether frozen or not, and let it do the rest. You can even view it while cooking.
7. Finally, let's end with some "meat product". Patent 5,322,705 presents a method for creating a highly processed meat product that visually resembles the initial food product, generally meat. Gross!

   

   Oh, goody, now we can all make "meat product"
   

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.  

Europe's Unitary Patent

On Dec. 10, 2012 the European Parliament approved two draft regulations concerning a unitary patent for its members. Unitary patents will be an additional option to the existing national patents and classical European patents and will offer coverage in the 25 participating European states. Unitary patents may be filed starting either January 1, 2014 or "the date of entry into force of the Agreement on a Unified Patent Court, whichever is the later."

More information is available from the European Patent Office's (EPO) unitary patent page.

EPO's New Patent Valuation Tool

Individual inventors and small to mid-sized companies might be interested in a new tool from the European Patent Office (EPO) that aids in estimating the value of a patent or of a company's patent portfolio. A press release from the EPO states that IPscore "uses 40 factors to assess each patent and visualises the input in spider and portfolio diagrams." To explain how to use the tool, the EPO has posted a brief introductory video entitled "Patent Portfolio Management with IPscore." The EOP is also hosting an online virtual classroom session and a two-day training course. Further information is available from IPscore