Patent Attorney and Founder
Hi everyone, I’m J.D. Houvener, and welcome to the Bold Today Show, where you, the inventor, entrepreneur, or business owner, get your daily dose of inspiration to make the world a better place. Happy Monday, everybody, and welcome back. And happy holiday! It is Memorial Day, and many of you might be vacationing, taking some time off. You know, I’m actually guilty of this sometimes too, where I kind of forget what the holiday actually means. Memorial Day, as you probably know, and as I’m saying this, is to honor those that have passed before us and is a special way to honor those that have been in the Armed Services in the military.
So today, I have a challenge for you. Whether you know someone personally or have someone in your family, or maybe yourself, a person that has served in the military, if you know someone that has passed and it has given you some real insight and inspiration to moving your technology forward, put it in the comments below. If you’re brave enough to share them with us, I really want to hear about it. I’m excited to hear about what your passion is and one of the main reasons why you move forward.
Today, I want to talk about an interesting inventor out of a town called Travelers Rest, South Carolina. Michael Garzon invented this invention. It’s a design patent, issued just a couple of years back. You can tell right from the front page of the design patent that it’s a design because you can see the letter D right in front of the numerical letters. The American tenth of the numbers of the patent, which we’ll see in this and the figures below, is that there are—it’s the American flag, no doubt. If you take a really close look, you’ll see that most of the flag is in dashed lines, including the stripes, the outline of the flag, and even the corner is in dashed lines. But what’s in solid lines are the stars, right, the 50 stars that represent the states. And if you look even closer, and this patent is actually all about not just the pattern or the orientation of the stars, but the fact that they’re raised up and they’re in three dimensions. A very unique way to do that using a design patent.
So what he’s done is he’s had a very specific drawing put together. I think it’s figure 1. As you can see, there are some dash lines that are very specifically drawn to show the shaving as that angle of the star edge goes upward. You can see that point. Design drawings are much more detailed than a utility drawing for patents is that it is really the whole part of what the rights are for a design application, a design patent under 35 USC 171. That’s the legal definition of ornamental. How it’s different from utility patents covering just what the design looks like. That’s the real domain of design patents, not so much to do with the fact that what the flag can move or that it provides perhaps a different buffer to the wind resistance. No, no, it’s just merely the way it looks and what it does, and not what it does.
So without further ado, I want to ask you a favor today. If you’ve been watching the Bold Today Show for a while, I ask you to pay it forward. Take a chance, send it to someone that you think might appreciate hearing a little bit about design patents, maybe someone that’s a patriot, and see if that inspires them to move their business forward to the next level. I’m your host J.D. Houvener of the Bold Today Show. Go big, go bold.