Posts in Business

When Temu launched in September 2022, it set out to connect consumers with sellers offering quality, affordable products. Today, the platform has built out a comprehensive system to keep counterfeit goods at bay. The number of brands Temu actively scans for fakes has grown from 3,000 to more than 5,000 over the past year. Temu now resolves more than 99% of requests to remove unauthorized products within three business days—most in under 24 hours. 

Patent portfolios are frequently discussed in terms of size, technological breadth, or litigation potential. Those characteristics may be easy to measure, but they are not what determines whether a portfolio succeeds or fails. At their core, patent portfolios are business assets that must be managed deliberately and strategically. When they are not, they become cost centers that quietly consume resources without delivering meaningful competitive advantage.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) on Wednesday affirmed a district court decision finding that Applied Predictive Technologies, Inc. (APT) had failed to sufficiently identify its trade secrets under either the state or federal trade secrets statutes. Business analytics company APT sued MarketDial, Inc. and John Stoddard in the U.S. District Court for the District of Utah for patent infringement and trade-secret misappropriation and later added Morgan Davis as a defendant and added breach-of-contract and tort claims.

This week on IPWatchdog Unleashed, I sat down with prolific inventor Gil Hyatt, exploring his innovative journey and aspirations to leave a lasting legacy. One of the key highlights of the conversation was Gil’s creation of a non-profit Pioneering AI Foundation, which is aimed at advancing AI technology and bolstering U.S. economic interests. This non-profit organization is set to hold Gil’s substantial portfolio of AI patent applications, which cover his pioneering work dating back to the 1980s, and includes groundbreaking claims in artificial intelligence that could revolutionize sectors like education, manufacturing, and trade.

“Run, don’t walk!” has become a familiar call across TikTok and Instagram, signaling that a new budget-friendly “dupe” has landed on store shelves. What was once quiet bargain-hunting has turned into a celebrated online trend, where creators openly compare low-cost look-alikes to premium products. But, as dupe culture surges, brand owners are increasingly turning to trademark and trade dress law to protect what they argue is far more than just a logo, but their brand identity.

This week on IPWatchdog Unleashed, I sat down with my business and life partner, Renee Quinn. In addition to telling Renee’s story about how she found her way into the intellectual property world, and through our sometimes-comical banter, we together explore what it really takes to build, sustain, and continuously reinvent an entrepreneurial company like IPWatchdog. What emerged was a practical roadmap for entrepreneurship, invention, navigating platform risk, and focused on the necessity of constantly being ready to pivot as old business models start to show signs of age and ultimately falter. From Renee’s journey from IP outsider to patented inventor, to firsthand lessons learned navigating Amazon’s reseller ecosystem, the discussion highlights how intellectual property operates in the real world, not the classroom.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is urging the White House to turn a proposal he floated into an Executive Order that would weaken the economy and cost the government tens of billions of dollars in foregone tax revenue. It’s bad policy, and even worse politically. The Trump Administration would be wise to reject it. Secretary Lutnick is convinced that the government is being short-changed when academic institutions make patentable inventions under federal grants, which are primarily licensed to entrepreneurial small companies that take great risk and expense to turn them into real-world products. The Secretary wants the government to seize 50% of the royalties that universities receive when resulting products are sold—sales that bolster our economy while promoting public well-being. 

This year saw a world in which many employees had forms of Generative AI (GenAI) at their fingertips, either in the workplace or on their personal devices, and a world in which organizations continued to face unprecedented levels of cyber risk as they continued their digital transformation journeys. While data breach litigation is not new and tales of company confidential information being copied and pasted into open GenAI tools have haunted employers for what feels like years, trade secret issues arising from data breaches and GenAI use were not really trending issues in the courts in 2025. Indeed, perhaps surprisingly, equitable and contractual duties of confidence lay at the heart of the few cases involving trade secrets that were considered by the UK courts in 2025, with directors being under the microscope and the courts again grappling with issues around the identification and particularization of the confidential information at issue.

The most contested element in establishing a prima facie Defend Trade Secrets Act (DTSA) trade secret misappropriation claim is whether the owner undertook “reasonable efforts” to maintain secrecy. Defendants routinely cite a lack of or poorly implemented security measures as a defense. On November 18, 2025, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in Samuel Sherbrooke Corporate Ltd. v. Mayer offered guidance on what constitutes such measures at the pleading stage, reversing the district court’s dismissal on the ground that the plaintiff failed to take reasonable measures to protect the trade secrets at issue.

Every November, we gather around tables filled with the fruits of hard work and gratitude. It’s a season that reminds us to pause and appreciate not only what we’ve built, but also the unseen effort and foresight that made it possible. In innovation, that same kind of gratitude is found in something often overlooked but profoundly important: Freedom to Operate (FTO). Most founders understand the excitement of being patent pending. But few truly grasp what it means to be free to operate. The two are not the same.

The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) today released its second edition of the WIPO Pulse comprehensive survey, titled “Global intellectual property perception survey 2025,” analyzing the perceptions of intellectual property of 35,500 respondents in 74 countries that represent approximately 80% of the target population aged 18 to 65 worldwide between February 20 and April 25.

Given the recent proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI) patent drafting technology, some in the legal services industry are asking whether AI is the patent profession’s “ultimate bad day,”on par with the dinosaurs’ ultimate bad day posited by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Luis Alvarez in 1980. Like the asteroid thought to cause a mass extinction of the dinosaurs, will AI be a formidable impactor that renders patent prosecution an unprofitable practice area in law firms and alternative legal service providers (ALSPs)? Will AI decimate patent prosecution as a viable career?

For startups, patents are often the first line of defense in building a competitive moat. They signal to investors that your company is not only innovative but also strategically protecting its differentiators. But not all patents are created equal. A weak or poorly conceived filing can raise more red flags than confidence. As a former United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Patent Examiner and now an Intellectual Property Strategist, I’ve seen both sides: portfolios that impressed investors and set startups up for long-term growth — and portfolios that did little more than drain resources. The difference comes down to strategy.

Representatives of 36 conservative organizations sent a letter yesterday to Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick, appealing to him as an inventor to walk back his proposal to charge a 1%-5% patent “tax” on the value of granted U.S. patents. Lutnick’s proposal was first reported by the Wall Street Journal in July. While few details have been revealed about the plan still, it has drawn harsh criticism, including by IPWatchdog’s Founder and CEO Gene Quinn, whose article was quoted in the conservative groups’ letter. Quinn called the idea “catastrophically stupid” and “fraught with peril.”

Late last week, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced that the agency was acceding to decisions by U.S. regional circuit courts vacating the agency’s Biden Administration-era rule banning noncompete clauses from U.S. employment contracts and preventing their enforcement. While some lawmakers have decried the decision to end this rule, the FTC also issued a request for information (RFI) as the Trump Administration seeks to develop a case-by-case enforcement approach for cracking down on noncompete abuses.