META This! Series Ep.5 - Does Your Employer Own Your Invention? Take the Quiz.

Illustration by @max_gps

META This! Series Ep. 5

Adam Diament, our patent attorney, gets into it with Ted Nguyen, who specializes in entertainment law; it’s all about patent prosecution, utility patents, who owns what, and for how long.

Podcast Transcript:

Adam Diament: Hello, this is the META This! Podcast from Nolan Heimann. It's a podcast about emerging technologies and in this episode we're going to talk about some intellectual property myths. My name is Adam Diament. I'm a patent attorney at Nolan Heimann and there are different types of patent attorneys. And what I focus on, it's called patent prosecution. And when a lot of people hear the word prosecution, they think about criminal prosecution. It has something to do with fighting patents in court, but that's not what patent prosecution is. Patent prosecution is the writing and getting a patent granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office and other trademark offices and patent offices throughout the world.

So if you're fighting about patents in court because you think someone infringed your patent, that's called litigation. But I focus on the prosecution part. And what this involves is, me talking to inventors about their invention, searching patent databases to see if there's something already out there similar to your patent and writing up the invention in a way to get the broadest amount of protection for the inventor. And this applies to, could be complicated things such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, also simple things such as a dog collar. On the podcast with me, I have another partner at the firm, Ted Nguyen. Ted, do you want to introduce yourself?

Ted Nguyen: Yeah, thanks so much for having me here today, Adam. I have none of those things that you just mentioned. I actually know very little about patents, but I specialize in entertainment law, which is kind of a broad statement, but I primarily focus my practice on the emerging medias, social media influencers, digital content creators and yeah, I've been doing this now for seven years, so thanks for having me on here today to talk about patents.

Adam Diament: All right. And just to reiterate, Ted is not a patent attorney. And actually patent law is not something that's covered in the required classes in law school. It's not on the bar exam. So unless you specifically take a class in intellectual property, you're probably not going to know anything about patent law. It's actually the only area of law where you have to pass a separate bar examination to do it. So if you just go to your regular attorney and say, "Hey, can you do this patent stuff for me?" They wouldn't even be allowed to do it. So we're going to be posing some questions to Ted, not expecting him to get most of these right. That's typical of attorneys that aren't patent attorneys, but it's also probably typical of many of our listeners who don't know much about patent law as well.

Ted Nguyen: You know, I really appreciate that disclaimer.

Adam Diament: All right.

Ted Nguyen: So that everyone knows what to expect.

Adam Diament: Exactly. So I remember before I went to law school and I'd ask an attorney a question, whatever it was they'd always say, "It depends." And I always hated that. I was always just, give me a straight answer, like yes or no. And then when I became an attorney myself, people would ask me a question and then I turned into the attorney I didn't want to be, I kept saying, "It depends." So when I ask you these questions, some are going to be true, some are going to be false, and some are going to be, it depends, but they're not all going to be, it depends, because I hate that as an answer to everything.

Ted Nguyen: Okay, well bring it on.

Adam Diament: All right.

Ted Nguyen: I'll try not to fail.

Adam Diament: Before we go into specific myths, maybe some of our listeners don't even know what a patent is. So here's your first question. True, false or it depends. A patent gives you the right to make and use your invention.

Ted Nguyen: Oh, this is one of those subtle law school questions that are like, it's so obvious that it's kind of tricky. It's like when my civil procedure professor asked me what a claim was and I had really no idea how to answer that question. But does it give you the right to use your invention? I'm going to guess and say no, it's never like an automatic thing.

Adam Diament: All right. So what would you say? Do you have a guess of what you would say a patent is or what it does? Can give you the right?

Ted Nguyen: A patent gives you the exclusive right to use the patent, but it doesn't necessarily mean that you have the right to it. I don't know. That sounds really kind of like a roundabout way of trying to say something very simple. And I'm sure you have an easier way of saying it, but I don't even know if I'm correct in saying no to that.

Adam Diament: You're getting a little bit closer. And actually the answer is, just false. It doesn't give you the right to do anything with your invention. What a patent gives you the right is to stop other people from making, using, selling or importing your invention. So maybe you think it's a nitpicky point stopping people from making and using and selling. Isn't that the same thing that I'm allowed to do all these things with my invention, but you can think of lots of cases where you have a patent and you actually can't do anything with it. So one example would be, let's say you come up with a patent for a new drug, all right? You have the right, you have the patent. If you don't have FDA approval, you can't sell it, you can't make it, you can't use it. So all you can do is stop other people from doing it, but you can't do it yourself without other permission.

Let's say in a more extreme example, you came up with a new invention for a new kind of atomic bomb. All right? Doesn't mean you could use it, it means you could stop other people. And maybe kind of the example that kind of comes up the most is let's say it was a long time ago. No one had come up with a pencil yet and you figured out, I'm going to have this piece of wood, I'm going to put graphite in the middle of it, and you end up getting a patent on it. Someone else comes along and they say, what would be really cool on this? Let's put an eraser on the end of it and you get a patent with that pencil and eraser. So you think, okay, I could just make that pencil and eraser. Would you be allowed to make your pencil and eraser? Ted, that's kind of your next question.

Ted Nguyen: Would I be allowed to make my pencil? I mean, I guess-

Adam Diament: If someone else has the patent on the pencil, but you come up with a new invention where you add an eraser to it and you get a patent on that pencil and eraser combination. Could you make your pencil eraser combination?

Ted Nguyen: No. Because if you're building off of the original patent, correct? Is this the scenario?

Adam Diament: Right, yeah.

Ted Nguyen: So no, you can't build off of, you can't use what is on that patent application to build off and create something better until the rights to that patent have expired.

Adam Diament: Right. So there are a couple ways we can do this. So if someone has a patent on the pencil and you're doing everything that the pencil has that's in the patent, you add something to it, you're still making that patented pencil and you're adding something to it. So if you actually want to make your pencil eraser combination, you'd have to get some kind of license from the original pencil holder or you could say, "Hey, I would like to buy your pencil patent from you." So that's generally how it works. So you could see, I get this question a lot from clients is, well, I got a patent on it, why can't I still do it? Well, if your patent is building on other patented things, you still have to be aware of that and you still might not be able to do it.

Ted Nguyen: Right, that's like the whole point of why a patent expires in 25 years so that people can build off of it. That's the whole reason.

Adam Diament: Yes, exactly. And that actually leads us to our next question. And this question actually appeared on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?  because I remember when it happened. So I looked it up, I got-

Ted Nguyen: What was the value of the question?

Adam Diament: It was $500,000.

Ted Nguyen: Oh, so it's going to be hard.

Adam Diament: It depends who you are. It was easy for me, but not for the contestant. The contestant did use their 50/50 and they did get it right. It was May 2nd, 2000 if you ever want to look it up. So this is going to be the question. It says, for what period does a utility patent give an inventor the sole right to manufacture an invention? And the choices are A, 20 years, B, 14 years, C, 50 years, D forever.

Ted Nguyen: I think I actually know this one and it's sad for me to think that I could've won $500,000 had that had been me. But it's 20 years, right?

Adam Diament: 20 years. That is correct. I heard you.

Ted Nguyen: I thought it was 25.

Adam Diament: Yeah, I was going to say, I didn't want to correct you at the time because I wanted to see what you'd say for the question. So 20 years, that's a general rule. There are some exceptions, especially if the patent office takes a long time to review your patent. It's not your fault. They'll tack on some time or some other acceptance too. But in general, 20 years protection and that means that you're allowed to stop other people from making, using and selling your invention. After those 20 years are up, it's considered a public domain. Anyone is free to copy it. Now the question did say utility patent and just so our listeners know there are different kinds of patents, but a utility patent is what most people think of when they hear a patent that it has some kind of use or it does something. The other two kind of patents are design patents that protect the look and there are plant patents that protect certain kind of plants.

But most of the time when people just say a patent where they're talking about is a utility patent. Now maybe you didn't catch this, but I'm going to ask the question again, the same question and there's actually something wrong with the question itself and some patent attorneys online actually said, this question isn't really a good question. So I'm going to say it again and tell me what we talked about so far, if we could figure out what's wrong with it. It says, for what period does utility patent give an inventor the sole right to manufacture an invention?

Ted Nguyen: Can you repeat that one more time for me?

Adam Diament: Yes. For what period does a utility patent give an inventor the sole right to manufacture an invention?

Ted Nguyen: Well the issue is the manufacturing part. It doesn't give you the sole right to manufacture something.

Adam Diament: Yeah, exactly. It's what we talked about before is that it gives you the right to stop other people from doing it right. It doesn't give you the right to manufacture. Maybe there are lots of reasons you can't manufacture it. Maybe it's like, I don't know, poisonous or whatever it is. If there was another choice up there that said none of the above, technically that probably would've been a more correct answer. So Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, if you ever need an attorney to read over your legal questions for accuracy, I'm here to help out to out. All right, so now that we know what a patent is, let's go into some myths or maybe they're not myths or maybe it depends and let's see if Ted can get it right. A patent will protect my invention worldwide. True, false or it depends?

Ted Nguyen: I want to say it's false because patents are just filed here with the USPTO and the name in and of itself should reveal that it's just the US and you probably have to seek other type of registrations in order to get your patent protected in other places.

Adam Diament: Ding. You got it right. The answer is false. So the general rule is that there is one patent per country. So a US patent is only good in the United States. A Canadian patent's only good in Canada. Now there are some exceptions to this one patent per country rule, but they don't apply in the United States. Some parts of the world have regional patents. So there's a European patent that covers more than 30 countries. There are several countries that got together in Africa, a Eurasian patent. But in general it's one patent for one country. And if you have a US patent and only a US patent, anyone can make and use your invention anywhere else in the world besides the United States. But remember, that you do have the right to stop others from importing your invention in the United States.

So sometimes a client will tell me they have a US patent, can someone knock it off in China? And the answer in this case is yes or no. People would be allowed to manufacture a knockoff of your invention in China. They can sell it in China, they can export it anywhere throughout the world except the United States because if you have a patent in the United States, you can stop those importations of the Chinese knockoff into the US because the US patent does protect that, but it doesn't protect what happens outside of the United States.

Ted Nguyen: I have a follow-up question to that then.

Adam Diament: Yeah.

Ted Nguyen: If you have a patent, I can't really think of the example, but if it's for something that exists online, how do you protect that? If it's a process, to a code or a processing system that occurs on a computer, on the internet for instance, and you know have the patent here in the United States, but then someone over in a different country uses that technology and distributes it online, how would you protect yourself in that scenario?

Adam Diament: Yeah, I think that would be pretty difficult to do, which is why a lot of people focus on getting patents in a few key industrial places. Like if someone comes to me and they say they want a worldwide patent, I say, well, if you're willing to spend millions of dollars, we could get a patent in every country. But a lot of people focus on let's do China, Japan, Korea, Europe. Because once it's out there, if someone is distributing that information and they're in the United States, you could probably get those servers to remove that information.

But it's probably difficult to stop someone, especially if it's a method patent, a method of doing something if you're just telling someone to do it technically, it's called indirect patent infringement because they're not doing it themselves, but they're telling people how to do it. But in another sense, the patent itself is a description of what to do. So anyone could look up the patent and see a method and then the question is, are you actually performing this method or are you directing people say, hey everyone, you should do this because the patent actually tells you how to do it. Then that also would be patent infringement.

Ted Nguyen: So you said which countries is a good starting point?

Adam Diament: Yeah, I would say oftentimes people like to get China just because a lot of stuff happens there in manufacturing, they have been getting better in IP because I've heard clients complain say, "Oh, I hear it's so bad in China that everyone just knocks off everything." I've heard it is better than it used to be. Europe because it covers so many countries. There's that European patent I mentioned that combines over 30 countries and oftentimes it'll be Japan, South Korea, Australia, Canada, those are kind of the big ones that people get.

Ted Nguyen: Got it. And it's pretty expensive, I'm assuming just in filing fees to do it in those countries?

Adam Diament: There's a high cost of getting a patent. I tell people, words you'll never hear from a patent attorney are, this won't be expensive at all. To get something on file initially, it may be somewhat of a low cost. And I say somewhat, it's a relatively speaking in the patent world. To get something on file, let's say in the United States it might be $10,000. But then if you're using that same application throughout the world, you don't have to rewrite it every time. So it won't be as expensive. Maybe it's a few thousand dollars to file, but by the time it gets examined and you're hiring attorneys in those countries and you pay yearly fees for them, I tell people, unless you're willing to spend minimum 15 to 25,000, it's probably not worth it.

That's money you could be spending on marketing or business development or other aspects. So here's your next question, Ted. We've talked about how there's no international protection with the US patent, but is there an international patent application, true, false or it depends?

Ted Nguyen: In my heart, I would love to believe that there's a UN of patents out there in the world and maybe even WIPO. Is it WIPO? Am I pronouncing it right?

Adam Diament: Yeah, there is something called WIPO.

Ted Nguyen: I don't know if they would do patents. I know they do trademarks, but I'm going to take a guess and say that they also handle patents. Why stop there?

Adam Diament: Yeah, so it is true. So we mentioned WIPO, an acronym for World Intellectual Property Organization. So even though I said there's no worldwide patent, there is an international patent application, that sounds kind of weird because how does that work? So how can you have an international application if there's no international patent? And the way this works, is that there are currently 157 countries throughout the world. They got together and they signed something called the Patent Cooperation Treaty. And it's through WIPO, you'll hear it called the PCT, the acronym for it. So you might hear international patent application or PCT application, it's the same thing and it doesn't turn into a patent by itself, but what it does is it serves as the basis for your application that you then file in foreign countries later. So let me give you an example.

Let's say you are an inventor, you want protection in the United States, China, Japan, Europe, Australia, Singapore. There's no patent that covers all of these places. But if you had an idea and without this treaty, you'd have to file separate applications in all these countries all pretty much close to the same time, get translations, find attorneys, pay all these government fees and attorney's fees all at the same time and it can get really expensive. So what the international application does, is you file one application in an international office and then that serves as the basis for all of these countries. So you don't need to file everywhere all at once, file that one application.

And what happens is you generally have two and a half years from that date to then pick what countries you want to go into. So a lot of people will use this strategy to kind of delay cost because let's say you have an idea, you don't know if it's going to make a lot of money, you don't want to be spending 50,000 plus dollars right away, but then you file an international application, you have some time to think about it. And then at that time then you can say, okay, is it worth it to now go into all these other countries? And when you go into these other countries, they all are working off of essentially that base application. So for many people, I kind of give a rule of thumb, if you're interested in more than three countries then it's probably worth considering doing this international application.

Ted Nguyen: What do you mean when you say it forms the basis of the application for the other countries?

Adam Diament: So we file this application and in a patent application you describe what your invention is, you describe the boundaries of it and it's uploaded to a server that kind of keeps this application. And then what I do is I have attorneys in countries throughout the world and I say, "Hey, we have an application, this is the application, the international application number, take this and submit it to your own patent office in Japan or whatever." So we don't need to rewrite the application. Depending on the country, you might need a translation of it. But the advantage is when you go into those foreign countries, it's as if you had filed it on that earlier date.

And that's one of the main reasons people do it is because if your invention is out in the public for too long, it's considered part of the public domain. So if you have an international application on file, it's if you'd had filed it throughout the world on that early international filing date. All right, let's do the next myth. And maybe it's not a myth, maybe it is. Let's see what Ted thinks. An inventor owns all of the intellectual property they create, true, false or it depends?

Ted Nguyen: This is giving, it depends, because it just really depends on what the inventor invented and I think that's a very subtle thing.

Adam Diament: What do you mean by what the inventor invented?

Ted Nguyen: Repeat the myth again for me.

Adam Diament: Okay. Inventor owns all of the intellectual property they create.

Ted Nguyen: Okay, so this kind of goes back to what we were just talking about. If they're building off of another patent, I'm assuming will likely have to disclaim the parts of it that have already existed and they're building off of and they can only claim the things that they've added on to that invention.

Adam Diament: Okay, so let's say they're only claiming that part that they came up with themselves. Do they necessarily own it themselves? Own that new part?

Ted Nguyen: The new part, yeah, they would own it for the amount of time that a patent allows them to own it for.

Adam Diament: All right, so I'm going to go with incorrect for that one.

Ted Nguyen: Oh, great.

Adam Diament: That's okay. But the answer still is, it depends. That's probably the most correct answer and I'll go into kind of the scenarios where maybe the inventor wouldn't own it. So by default the inventor of the invention owns that intellectual property. So let me give you one scenario. Let's say you're unemployed, you're at home, you come up with an invention, you file a patent application, you're listed as the inventor and the applicant, you get a patent. That's easy scenario. You are the owner of that patent. If that's your case, you have the sole right to stop others from making, using and selling your invention.

Now the biggest issue of where it depends comes in, is if you're an employee of someone where maybe you don't own your invention but the employer does, even if the employer didn't invent anything. So here's another scenario for you to think about, Ted. Let's say you are a computer scientist and you've come up with some new AI for when you write in a text prompt, the pictures, the images that come up, they are going to be much more realistic. And who do you think would own the patent rights to that new kind of software, new coding that you've come up with?

Ted Nguyen: And this is a person that works for a company, you're saying?

Adam Diament: Yeah, let's say they work for Google and they come up with this.

Ted Nguyen: I mean I would ask to see the contract, see what this person signed, and if it has that magic word, those words that you don't want to hear sometimes if it's a work for hire, it means that your company owns it.

Adam Diament: Yeah. So I thought I was going to trick you one there because remember the default position is that the inventor owns the invention. All right, so the question is whether this strays from that default. And most of the time if we're talking about employee situations, there is something in that employee employer contract. You probably didn't even look at it when you joined the company. There's probably some clause there that says all inventions are assigned to the company. And for most situations, if you've come up with something and you're working at a company, most likely it's going to be owned by that company. So let me give you kind of another scenario. Let's say you're that same computer scientist, you're working at Google, you sign something that said, you know, assign all inventions to the company, but you come up with a dog leash. Who in this situation here, who do you think would own that dog leash patent if you were able to get a patent on it?

Ted Nguyen: Well, if your position at Google is dog leash maker, then we would be within the course of your work at Google, and if that's the case, then Google would likely own the leash as well. In a weird world where you're like an inventor at Google and making dog leashes for them, then they would own the leash. But if it truly has nothing to do with your job at Google, then I would say you would own the dog leash.

Adam Diament: Yeah, that's probably how it would work. So even though if your contract says all inventions are going to be owned by the company, of course you generally don't interpret it that literally. And it does depend on what state you're in. So California is very inventor friendly and they'll look at different factors. One of them is how related is it to the work that you're doing at the company. If it's totally unrelated, the company wants you to do AI work and you invented a dog leash, that's a factor that kind of weighs for the inventor owning the patent.

But let's say he was doing all of this dog leash invention at work time using Google computers, doing all that kind of stuff at Google, Google's going to make the case like, hey, he was our employee, he was on work time. Even though we don't do dog leashes, this is still our invention. So that's the argument they would make. If the guy was only doing this on weekends at home, not related to his work stuff, then all that stuff kind of leans in favor of inventor owning the invention. But, there's going to be lots of gray zones and that's why we have patent attorneys to fight about all these things about which factors are more important.

Ted Nguyen: And I think for most of these employee employer contracts, there is a disclaimer that you can make for prior inventions that things that you did before working at the company that you're pretty much claiming, hey, you don't own any of this stuff. It was in existence prior.

Adam Diament: And even if that wasn't there, they probably would own it anyways because as I said, by default the owner owns the invention unless there's something specific that says otherwise.

Ted Nguyen: So what happens if you incorporate things that you had invented prior to working at Google, for example, and you incorporate all these things into the Google work that you've done?

Adam Diament: Yeah, I mean I could see that's a type of case that probably comes up a lot where there's a mix of knowledge that goes in. And probably what it comes down to is in the kind of finished product of the patent if there are aspects of it that you have come up with that while you were an employee, I think Google probably would have, or whatever company it is, would've pretty strong legal arguments to say that the invention is theirs.

Ted Nguyen: And money.

Adam Diament: And so I've seen inventors kind of have, in that contract when they sign up with a company that specifically says, I have done this in the past, I want to keep this and any modifications I do to it as part of my own. So that has been part of the negotiations that I've seen happen. I think probably some of these big companies are probably just saying, hey, we're not signing anything where you can retain your rights, but if you feel like you're in a strong position as an employee and they're trying to recruit you, that's something that you could negotiate.

Ted Nguyen: Okay. So Adam, I actually have a question for you for maybe some of my content creator clients out there. So if you are for instance, a makeup artist and you have a very specific way of applying makeup and you apply for the patent, I'm not sure if that would be granted, you'd have to tell me, but let's say for example that this person does have a patent and they're doing it online and showing people how to do it and other makeup content creators then try your process. Does that original owner of that makeup process now have the ability to charge people for doing it online?

Adam Diament: Yeah, potentially they do. So in order to get a patent, there are kind of three criteria. It has to be new, has to be useful and has to be non-obvious. And you could get patents for physical objects. You could also get patents for methods. In this case it would be a method patent. The new usually is pretty easy to overcome just because any little thing that hasn't been done before, no matter how much you tweak it or how little you tweak it, is considered new. The useful part is also a pretty easy hurdle to overcome because almost anything has a use. This is to make a face more beautiful or something like that. Usually the biggest hurdle if you get a patent rejection is going to be the non-obvious part. So sometimes your example is putting on makeup, but let's take an example of a method of making also a new food item like a new chicken dish.

It's going to be obvious if you add salt, pepper and chicken that the final product is going to be something that tastes like chicken and salt and pepper. So that's hard to overcome in that sense. So in the sense of doing makeup and beauty, one of the hurdles might be, okay, well it's obvious if you apply makeup in this way it's going to give you this kind of look. But maybe this person has a new kind of blending technique that no one's ever done before or they're using different types of tools to give a certain kind of look. So the method will incorporate using a brush that has these features and applying makeup in this part of the face. So those are all things that potentially could be patentable. If you look up on patent databases, there are several of them. One that users might be able to look at pretty easily is called Free Patents Online.

You could just type in method of applying makeup and you will see various patents that are there, method of applying makeup that goes through the step, have the steps of A, B, and C. So if someone does something that is A, B, and C, then they're infringing your patent. And if you're someone on TikTok and you have taken someone else's methods of applying makeup, and if that person is doing A, B and C, then it's patent infringement and you have to get some type of licensing deal from the creator in order to do it either yourself or to tell other people to do it.

Ted Nguyen: Because I think that's something that digital content creators really struggle with when they are teaching their audience things that they've come up with is that the little guys, the ones that are coming up with this aren't getting the credit for it. Because once something goes viral, you kind of lose track of where this came from. And especially if a big brand then uses your method, the brand gets the credit for it. So oftentimes I get clients asking, can I patent this dance move that I did on TikTok? And I don't think you can patent a dance move, but I think people are very curious about how they protect things that they put out there on the internet.

Adam Diament: Because so-

Ted Nguyen: It feels very public domain when you do that.

Adam Diament: So in terms of let's say dance moves or choreography, potentially that is protectable through copyright. It's not my specialty, but from what I understand is that you can register choreography through the copyright office. How long that would have to be in order for someone to get registration for it, if I just did two hand movements, that's probably not going to be copyrightable. I remember there was some issues with someone trying to copyright various yoga poses and doing them in a certain order. And there are lots of issues with that, whether that's copyrightable or not. So for the people who are just doing a short snippet of a dance that maybe just takes five or 10 seconds, that might be in the more difficult end to get copyright protection for it. But if they're doing a longer thing potentially that could be copyright protection.

Ted Nguyen: So I think the dance moves was a bad example because that's a copyright thing. But I guess with the makeup processes, that could theoretically be a patent and if you wanted to protect it, you could. But that's always the question is just because I can protect it, should I? You want people to talk about your methods and try your processes out online. But at the same time you also want to protect it as well. It's weird. I don't really know what the answer to that is.

Adam Diament: And I think especially for people in that field, the cost of a patent is kind of prohibitive because if you're spending $10,000 on a makeup technique, the question is, are you really going to never recoup that from some potential infringers? Answer is maybe yes, maybe no. But for some people it just might not be worth it. And if you get knocked off, you get knocked off, but if you were first to market and you make money that way or you just get more followers or for whatever reason you can be successful without a patent. So I would caution someone if they came to me and said, I want to make a patent. I was like, we might be able to do it, but in the end, how valuable is it going to be? Are you going to hire attorneys to send cease and desist letters? And when you put that all together, maybe it's worth it, maybe it's not. But it's just something you always have to consider.

Ted Nguyen: And I think perception is a big part of it too. If you are this really famous makeup artist online and you have a patent to a method of applying your makeup and you're suddenly sending cease and desist letters to all these other content creators, I think it potentially would look bad to do something like that. It's just very weird because social media is a place where all the IP rules still apply, but people feel like it doesn't.

Adam Diament: Right? Yeah, definitely.

Ted Nguyen: It's social media.

Adam Diament: There are other intellectual property rights like trademarks and copyrights that we didn't go into. We just talked about patents because that's my experience. But there are going to be specific things about who owns artwork and designs and logos. And sometimes the answer is simple. And again, sometimes it's not. That's why we have lawyers. And in future podcasts, we're going to have some of our other attorneys at Nolan Heimann that are going to talk about trademark and copyrights. Thank you for listening to the META This! Podcast, brought to you by Nolan Heimann, and we will see you next time.