Patents, trademarks, copyrights: Protecting intellectual property a must for Topeka’s Bartlett & West

By: Morgan Chilson

Patents 9,533,698 and 9,771,090 protect the design of a railway monitoring system owned by Topeka’s Bartlett &West and Kentucky-based R.J. Corman Railroad Group.

On file with the U.S. Patent &Trademark Office, the patents represent years of work and immersion in a complex process of patent law that they initially didn’t know anything about, said B&W president Keith Warta. His name, along with the names of Bartlett employees Douglas Morrison and Chris Cobb, and employees with R.J. Corman appear on the patent.

Patents are the way that people legally protect their inventions, said Overland Park patent attorney Thomas Luebbering, who worked with Bartlett &West on the patent process. “It doesn’t matter what you call it, it doesn’t matter about the manuscript or any copyright, it’s the invention, the product itself and any structural or functional aspects of the product.”

People often are confused about the difference between patent, copyright and trademark.

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“What a copyright covers are basically creative works of authorship, manuscripts, books, paintings, anything you would think of as a creative work for authorship, and that’s copyrightable,” Luebbering said. “You won the copyright the moment the work is created. So if you sit down and write a poem, you can immediately write on there copyright 2017. You can also register it with the copyright office, but you don’t have to.”

A trademark covers a mark itself, which is anything that is used to identify products or services, he said. The three things can co-exist.

“If you invented a new mobile phone, that one device would have a patent on whatever structural things you invented with your phone, trademark on the name you applied to it, and it would have a copyright on some of the artistic parts,” Luebbering said.

For the Bartlett &West team that worked on the rail monitoring system, the patenting process was complex, and members appreciated the way Luebbering’s firm helped them work through all the steps.

Bartlett &West sought the patent when it was a conceptual idea and didn’t have a lot of detail supporting it, Warta said. They contacted Luebbering, who explained that patent law had changed around 2013 to give the patent to the first person to file, not the first person to invent.

Once the three men understood the significance, they filed a patent as quickly as they could, even though a team of people at Bartlett &West was working on the details that would make the rail system a reality.

That shift in the law was significant, Luebbering said. Previously, if an inventor could prove he was working on an invention first, the patent would be given to him. Now, it’s a race to the patent office.

“It doesn’t matter that you invented yours first, if I file before you do, then my application is taken priority over yours,” he said. “You would lose your patent right, and I would gain. It’s really changed things quite a bit. Now inventors, if they want to file a patent, are well advised to move quickly and get something filed right away.”

That was the first of many patent law complexities that Warta, Morrison and Cobb were exposed to as they began to understand the detail they would need to protect their technology.

Early on in the project, Cobb said they considered the idea might be patentable. As they figured out how much financial investment they had in purchasing components, they “got serious about trying to protect that investment,” he said.

They were surprised, though, at how long and challenging the process was.

“Things never move as fast as you would like for them to move,” Warta said. “You think this is an idea and it’s going to catch on and we’re going to be able to bring value to our clients within a matter of weeks or months. It just drags out.”

They began working with Luebbering in 2014, although initial ideas for their system had come up in 2011, Cobb said.

“Our initial patent was issued on Jan. 3, 2017, and we now have a second one that is related to the first one,” he said.

The men were challenged to keep “inventor’s notebooks,” which are expected to contain every single detail of the process.

“I think the biggest challenge for us was once you identify that you have an idea that’s patentable is to identify every claim step,” Morrison said. “You have to make a claim of what your patentable technology does, and then you have to have art that represents that.”

Going back to 2011 when they first purchased a LIDAR scanner, basically a 3-D scanner, they had to re-create and write down every step, with supporting art or designs, he said.

“So we had to get into things like inventors notebooks and we had to keep track of every thought process that goes down,” Morrison said. “You have to date and timestamp it, sign it, and all of that history has to come forward into these claims. The patent attorneys are invaluable in that process because it’s a lot of abstract kind of thought out there that we’re bringing into a product that we want to protect.”

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