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Uniformity and predictability are often lacking from judicial treatment of cases involving vicarious liability claims against franchisors, yet uniformity and predictability are the hallmarks of a successful franchise system, and the engines that have driven franchising to occupy such a prominent position in the domestic and worldwide economy.

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Many technically intensive companies utilize patent liaisons to augment their intellectual property (IP) work. Patent liaisons work with patent attorneys and inventors and can have a wide variety of job responsibilities, thereby helping to provide additional trained "legal" resources to a business in a very economical manner.

Is it the chicken or the egg? Your client InventCo thinks it has several great new products, but it needs money to bring the products to the U.S. marketplace. Tooling costs money, as does producing sufficient inventory, and don't even mention what needs to be put aside to pay the patent attorney ' all for products that might flop in the market. "You've got to spend money to make money," InventCo's president says. "Too bad I can't offer them for sale now and see if any of them actually sell before I start the patenting process, but I remember what you told me about 1-year on-sale bars and what happed to that Pfaff guy," he continues. "Hold on a minute," you tell him, "there's a way around <i>Pfaff</i>."

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The term "nanotechnology" generally refers to the fabrication and manipulation of materials and devices on the scale of about 1-100 nanometers, and has become one of the key technology buzzwords for 2004. The passage of the 21st Century Nanotechnology Research and Development Act, Pub. L. No. 108-153, which authorized $3.7 billion in federal funding from 2005 through 2008 for the support of nanotechnology research and development, has fueled the fervor over nanotechnology. This substantial funding came as the scientific community and industries as diverse as cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, and petrochemicals were increasingly discovering that, when reduced to nanoscale size, ordinary bits of matter often manifest radically different physical properties. <i>See</i> Joseph Brean, <i>The Next Big (Little) Thing,</i> National Post (Feb. 6, 2004).

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If you asked 100 patent attorneys walking down the street, "What is the PCT for?", the vast majority would answer that the PCT is used to file a U.S. patent application under the Paris Convention to reserve patent rights in many other countries. A minority of them might reply (particularly if they were on a street in New York or Washington), that the PCT is the way their foreign clients bring their own applications into the United States. But very few would answer, "to control the timing and location of my search and the timing and location of my examination for my U.S. patent application."

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The Treasury Department announced on June 18 that it will extend the "make available" provisions of the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act (TRIA) through 2005, the third year of the federal Terrorism Risk Insurance Program.

In the last several years, a number of insurance companies including Chubb, AIG, InsureTrust (through Lloyd's of London), Venture Programs, Intellectual Property Risk Management ("IPRM"), and Litigation Risk Management, Inc. ("LRM") have begun offering insurance that pays costs associated with infringement of patents only, or infringement of some combination or all of patents, trademarks, trade dress, copyrights and trade secrets. For purposes of this article we will refer to these polices covering intellectual property as "IP infringement policies." IP infringement policies vary by carrier and property covered. The following descriptions are necessarily general.

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