Posts Tagged ‘Legal’

Al’s Morning Meeting:

The U.S. Patent Office is sitting on a mountain of applications that would take at least six years to clear, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel found in a two-part investigation.

The newspaper points out that a patent could be the key that protects an upstart company or idea. It could ignite the economy, but the backlog of applications means an inventor can wait at least three and a half years to get action.

The Journal Sentinel contends the Patent Office’s practice of publishing detailed applications on its Web site 18 months after the inventor files them — regardless of whether the office has begun to examined them — invites competitors anywhere in the world to steal ideas.

“For more than a dozen years starting in 1992, Congress siphoned off a total of $752 million in fees from the Patent Office to pay for unrelated federal projects, decimating the agency’s ability to hire and train new examiners.

“Staff turnover has become epidemic. Experts say it takes at least three years for a patent examiner to gain competence, and yet one examiner has been quitting on average for every two the agency hires.

“In many cases, applications languish so long that the technology they seek to protect becomes obsolete, or a product loses the interest of investors who could give it a chance at commercial success. ‘Patents are becoming commercially irrelevant to product life cycles,’ said John White, a patent attorney and former examiner.”

Photo by USPTO.

From Business Opportunities Weblog.

Houston Chronicle:

If a thief steals a car, authorities usually return it to the rightful owner if they find it.

But if a prime piece of online real estate — a domain name — is stolen, it may not be as simple to get back.

Just ask Marc Ostrofsky.

The Houston dot-com figure, known for selling the Web domain Business.com for $7.5 million, says he and his partners have spent 30 months and $150,000 trying to recover the allegedly stolen name P2P.com.

Ostrofsky’s experience illustrates that a lack of criminal prosecutions in such cases and laws in the area can make getting stolen sites to the rightful owners difficult.

Getting a stolen domain name back proves difficult because unlike the theft of cars and other property, there’s been little prosecution for theft of such Internet real estate.

Jeff Becker, an intellectual property attorney in Dallas, has recovered names that infringed on trademarks through civil lawsuits and the use of the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act, specifically designed to protect companies from such violations.

But P2P.com’s case is about stolen property, not trademark infringement, he noted.

Adding to the difficulty is that domain names aren’t physical property, but a right to contract, he said, because owners pay for the right to use the name.

“Here it’s allegedly stolen property,” he said. “It will be novel issue.”

Photo by svilen001.

From Business Opportunities Weblog.

Yahoo Finance:

Consider these jobs — some rather traditional and others unexpected — for interesting at-home work and good (if competitive) prospects.

1. Virtual Assistant
This is a field with much potential, in part because the title description covers many things. “You can fit your offerings to what you know how to do,” says Foster. One can own a virtual assistant business or work from home for a company that makes you available to other employees or clients.

2. Medical Transcriptionist
As Foster knows, being a medical receptionist is a demanding job, and nearly every company listed on her site seeks applicants with experience and/or training from certain schools. The work involves listening to and typing up dictation from doctors — some of whom have difficult accents, slur words together, and even “eat, drink, chew gum (and) talk to other people in the room” while dictating, she says.

3. Translator
Those with fluency in more than one language translate audio files or documents, not just word for word but often with cultural differences in mind. “Companies can access home-based translators with hard-to-find language skills without being held back by geographic location,” says Fell.

4. Web Developer/Designer
Information technology is the sector, Durst says, where most of the home-based hiring is being done. Terri Orlowski, a virtual assistant and Web developer based in Ledyard, Conn., offers services such as custom Web site design, template modification and redesigns, code updates, hosting, and usability reviews.

5. Call Center Representative
When you phone to order something from a catalog or infomercial, a big office with rows of cubicles may come to mind. But the person on the other end of the line is likely to be sitting in a home office. “It’s a huge and growing industry,” says Durst of companies that hire independent contractors to take calls from home.

For five more work-at-home jobs, go here.

Photo by shlomaster.

From Business Opportunities Weblog.