Abstract

Simon Goodman is a patent attorney who has worked at Reddie & Grose LLP in Cambridge since 1996. Based on this experience he will discuss factors that inventors and their employers should consider in protecting their intellectual property, including issues that he often sees leading to difficulty when a company wants to licence or sell a technology. Should a patent application be filed, or some other form of IP? How much information is needed in a patent? What risks are there in making an invention public? What should be kept secret? Who owns the invention and why does it matter? Are you free to sell the product? Does all this depend on the technology involved? And from this last question, are software and business methods patentable and what can engineers do to help the Patent Office raise the quality of such patents? He will also touch on the use of patent filing statistics as a measure of economic success – how is UK plc faring?

Simon is a Partner in Reddie and Grose LLP and has over 20 years experience advising clients in patent, trade mark and design matters. His clients include a wide range of companies and universities from around the world, but primarily those based in Cambridge and East Anglia. He works in fields such as engineering, materials, electronics, software, medical devices, telecommunications, television, semiconductor fabrication and cryptography.