Wednesday 8 October 2008

FreePatentsOnline: a remarkable symmetry

I have recently been browsing the FreePatentsOnline website following receipt of a press release concerning the launch of FPO's "Patent Plaque Program". The gist of this programme is that
"inventors and/or companies can create a Patent Plaque™ with a mouseclick, to promote their Intellectual Property on blogs, websites, personal pages on social network sites, corporate directories, etc".
This programme is apparently sponsored by the recently released (in the US, at any rate) Universal movie Flash of Genius, which tells the tale of an inventor whose fight to receive recognition for his ingenuity would come at a heavy price:
"Determined engineer Robert Kearns (played by Greg Kinnear, right) refused to be silenced as he took on the auto industry in a battle that nobody thought he could win".
My curiosity concerning FPO has now been stimulated and I wonder whether any readers of this blog can tell me anything about it. The notion of securing sponsorship funding from a copyright-driven movie, agreeing to plug its trade mark-protected name in order to facilitate the promotion of patented inventions has a sort of equilateral symmetry about it.

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