Understanding the different types of intellectual property is an important knowledge that all in-house counsel should master. Patents, trademarks, copyrights, and trade secrets are valuable assets of the company and understanding how they work and how they are created is critical to knowing how to protect them.
Instead, patent attorneys aim to settle IP disputes outside of court through means such as cease and desist letters, opposition proceedings and revocation actions. Conversely, IP lawyers specialise in the legal and commercial issues that are associated with IP.
What Is a Soft IP Core? A soft IP core is generally offered as synthesizable register-transfer level (RTL) models. These are developed in a hardware description language such as SystemVerilog, VHDL, or occasionally are provided synthesized with a gate level netlist.
Patent agents require 12 months of work experience in the patent field and successful completion of examinations set by the Commissioner of Patents. They may also be required to be listed in the register of patent agents.
Soft IP is intellectual property other than patents, including copyrights, trademarks, and trade secrets. It can also describe other assets that are harder to categorize, such as general knowledge about a product or confidential information held by a company.
In the United States, patent agents can perform a variety of the same tasks as attorneys, including representing clients before the USPTO. However, unlike patent attorneys, patent agents cannot represent clients in other legal matters, such as prosecuting an infringement in court.
On the EU level, the term soft law has been used to describe various kinds of quasi-legal acts of the European Communities, such as "codes of conduct", "guidelines", "notices", "recommendations", or "communications".
Copyright is a mechanisms that can be used to protect the tangible expressions of your intellectual property. Copyright applies to particular literary and artistic works, but doesn't cover ideas, methods, designs or other intangible ideas. These may be protected by other aspects of IP law.
In short, a patent attorney obtains the IP rights for a client helps in asserting or defending those rights; and an IP solicitor deals with in-depth litigation of IP rights. If you have an idea or invention which needs protecting, you need to speak with a patent attorney rather than an IP lawyer/solicitor.