Nanotechnology

4Intellectual Property

The first step to protecting the intellectual property of a company is to use the U. S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) (http:www.uspto.gov/). The USPTO is the source for all information needed on patents, trademarks, and IP law and policy. Patent systems vary around the world among industrialized nations, but most use the U S patent system as a model As such, we will use the U S model to discuss this.

A patent, as ruled by the U. S. Supreme Court, is anything that is ″a product of human ingenuity″ and can be protected by patent. U. S. law divides the various interventions that can be patented into four broad categories:

1. A process, e.g., a particular way of combining chemicals to produce a medicine
2. A machine, e.g., ...