Brown & Michaels, PC
Intellectual Property Home Page

We hope this collection of web pages will help you answer your questions about your intellectual property rights - in other words, "who owns what's in your head?" The pages you can access from this home page will cover patents, trademarks, and copyrights. If you're not sure which you need, our intellectual property overview page will help.

You can view some patents our clients have obtained in a variety of fields, check out some trademarks we've registered, or look at a few weird and wonderful patents we had nothing to do with. To help you get your thoughts about your invention down on paper, there's a disclosure form for you to download and use, and we have Patent , Trademark and Copyright budget estimators with the procedures and costs of filing patent, trademark and copyright applications.

Our "How do I...?" pages will help you with specific instructions for reading a patent or other patent document, figuring out if a patent or copyright is still in force, searching trademarks, and so on. You can also find Patent and Trademark Glossaries and a Patent Application Template from the "How Do I...?" page.

The "America Invents Act" of 2011

On September 8, 2011, the Senate passed the "Leahy-Smith America Invents Act" - also known as "Patent Reform" - and President Obama signed the act into law on September 16, 2011. The act is now fully implemented - for details, see our page on the America Invents Act

The main pages on our site are:

Intellectual Property Overview
Patents
Trademarks
Copyrights
"How do I...?" - self-help pages for understanding "patentese", figuring out patent term, searching trademarks, etc.

Other important pages on our website:

What's it cost?: Patent , Trademark or Copyright fee schedules.
IP Links and Resources - and our Legal Research Page has many other links.
More information on Brown & Michaels, including individual biographies of the professionals in our firm, and more detail on the firm itself.
Site Map - a list of the pages on the site, for quick reference
Linking Policy: If you're going to ask us to link to your page, please review our linking policy first.
Privacy Policy: See our privacy policy page.

Need to contact us?

Use our Contact Form, send e-mail to our general firm address bpm@bpmlegal.com, or you can view our staff directory for individual e-mail addresses and phone extensions.

Planning to visit our office? Here's where we are in Ithaca. (courtesy of Google Local)

Statement of Clients' Rights Notice

New York State Court Rules (22 NYCRR 1210.1) require our posting a Statement Of Clients Rights (a link to NY State Unified Court System web page)

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About Brown & Michaels, PC

BROWN & MICHAELS' office is located in Ithaca in the Finger Lakes region of central New York State. Since 1980, we have represented individual inventors, research institutions, high tech start-ups and established companies, both locally and world-wide. In addition to patent and trademark prosecution, we can help with contracts and licenses and other legal services for your business.

The inventors we represent have received patents on cell lines, chemical processing methods, electronics, energy systems, medical diagnostics, furniture, software, tools, and vaccines (and this is just a sample). We are highly responsive to inventors and deliver high quality work at very reasonable rates.

For more information about our firm, and brief biographies of our professional staff, see our Firm Bio page.

We can also offer Intellectual Property Litigation, as well as other corporate and business services, through our relationship with the prestigious 100-year-old law firm of Coughlin and Gerhart LLP.