• Stuart J. West, Managing Patent Attorney, West & Associates
• Ted Marsh, Patent Agent, West & Associates

• 7:00 PM Social time/refreshments in “Green Room”
• 8:00 PM Program Recording in Main Studio

Program:

You’re in the zone and on-task, working away, when someone drops an “intellectual property matter” onto your already full plate. You think: “Don’t they know I'm really busy? What are they talking about, anyway? Is this going to be another off-task chore that gets in the way of my real engineering work? Why can’t somebody else take care of this for me?”

Intellectual property (IP), a business issue and key company asset, affects every engineer. Your company's survival—or your competitors'—can depend on successfully handling IP matters.

IP can take many forms, including patent, trademark, copyright, and trade-secret. How do those work? How can you get them? What can you do with them? To what extent can you pin down costs, time frames, risks, and outcomes for getting and using them?

What about those “agreement” papers that crop up when IP is in play? (Should they be called “dis-agreements”?) What should I watch out for in a nondisclosure agreement (NDA), an employee IP agreement, or a consulting contract? How do I protect my personal interests and my business interests when a disagreeable “agreement” stands between me and that next great consulting gig, or between me and my new job as a company employee?

Is this IP game stable? How much do the rules change over time? Is the game played mostly in the center of the field? Is someone moving the goal posts around?

Our speakers, Managing Attorney Stuart J. West and Patent Agent Ted Marsh, of West & Associates, will suggest some useful answers. Don't miss this great learning opportunity, but if you're knee-deep in work and can't stop by the KMVT studios that night, watch for the SF Section on-demand, online video podcast of this event on Blip.tv , available in early November, 2009.

SPEAKER BIOGRAPHY:
Stuart J. West, is the managing patent attorney at West & Associates, which he founded in 2004. He coordinates prosecution, transactional, and litigation matters. He counsels clients on all aspects of intellectual property rights, including obtaining, protecting and enforcing rights associated with patents, trademarks, service marks, trade names, trade secrets and copyrights. The technical fields of his practice cover a wide area, including flash memory, programmable logic, semiconductor devices, disk and tape drives, holographic optical elements, optical networking, optical data storage and transmission, and telecommunications. Mr. West is an Adjunct Professor of Patent and Intellectual Property Law at California State University, East Bay. He is a founding member of the Contra Costa Innovation Center, whose mission is to help small inventors and businesses grow.

Ted Marsh is a patent agent at West & Associates. He is responsible for patent prosecution in the areas of electrical engineering, software, and related technologies. Mr. Marsh has over twenty years of experience in the hands-on development of products for professional digital media production. He has been an independent consultant, a senior manager of digital media engineering at SGI (Silicon Graphics), and held design engineering positions at SGI, Abekas Video Systems, and Ampex.

West & Associates is a full service law firm specializing in the practice of intellectual property law. Our attorneys and patent agents are registered with the US Patent & Trademark Office, and licensed to practice patent law in all fifty states.

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