IP Spotlight

		Brad Williams
		Bradley P. Williams is a partner in the Dallas office of Baker Botts. He started his career at Baker Botts in 1995. Mr. Williams’ practice focuses primarily on procuring, managing, licensing, and enforcing patents and other intellectual property assets. Mr. Williams has broad familiarity with technology in the mechanical, electrical, and computer arts, holding engineering degrees in both electrical and mechanical engineering. Before performing his graduate work and attending law school, both at the University of Virginia, Mr. Williams worked in industry as a consulting engineer. Mr. Williams represents clients in actions pending before the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in the federal courts, as well as in licensing transactions. He also works with clients to audit, establish, and manage patent programs as a principal way of protecting their products and markets, and providing value from IP in defensive and transactional contexts. Recently, Mr. Williams negotiated the intellectual property allocation provisions of a billon dollar outsourcing deal on behalf of a global leader of business process outsourcing services. Mr. Williams represents clients in a variety of industries, with particular expertise in the electronics and telecommunications industries. Mr. Williams also has substantial experience in representing universities in intellectual property matters.

Articles

New CREATE Act Provides Additional Protection, Bolsters Validity, For Inventions Jointly Made By Employees Of Multiple Entitites

Jenni Moen

On December 10, 2004, President Bush signed into law an amendment to 35 U.S.C. Section 103(c) that broadens the scope of collaborative research that is exempted as prior art for obviousness rejections. Prior to the  a mendment, Section 103(c) provided a safe harbor for inventions that were the product of collaborative efforts of co-inventors within a single company or other entity. The recent amendment, which has been largely welcomed by industry and the legal community, is called the Cooperative Research and Technology Enhancement (CREATE) Act. The CREATE Act broadens the scope of the Section 103(c) exception by encouraging and rewarding joint research and collaborative efforts among inventors in separate research organizations. More specifically, the CREATE Act allows the sharing of confidential information among research partners of differing entities without creating a bar to the patentability of their joint invention. Thus, the CREATE Act is of particular interest to companies, universities, government labs, and other organizations who commonly join others outside their organization for the purposes of inventive research. Read More...

New FTC Guidelines Provide Added Guidance For Classification Of Electronic Mail Messages Under The CAN-SPAM Act

Edward J. Marshall

The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, which went into effect January 1, 2004, was enacted to address concerns about the negative effects of unsolicited commercial electronic mail (“e-mail”) messages (often called “spam”) on the efficiency and convenience of electronic mail as a whole, and to protect consumers from offensive or fraudulent e-mail messages.1 Although the desirability and effectiveness of the CAN-SPAM Act are debatable,2 a business must be mindful of the Act's possible impact on its legitimate marketing and customer relation campaigns. In particular, a business should be aware of the Federal Trade Commission's (“FTC's”) recently-issued guidelines for determining the primary purpose of an e-mail message3 so that legitimate, non-spam e-mail messages do not run afoul of the CAN-SPAM Act. Read More...