Marketa Trimble is a professor of law at the William S. Boyd School of Law. On Feb. 23, Professor Trimble wrote a guest blog titled “A Patent on the Internet” for Patently-O, the nation’s leading patent law blog.
In her blog, Professor Trimble discusses the scenario of a U.S. patent application that “seeks a patent on simultaneous compliance with multiple countries’ data privacy laws on the internet through broad method claims.”
She writes, “If someone could patent a method for complying simultaneously with multiple countries’ data privacy laws on the internet and claim the method broadly enough to cover all possible methods of achieving compliance with the national privacy laws, that patent owner might just as well own a patent on the internet, or at least on a very large percentage of internet activity … Whatever the future might bring for the claimed invention, this patent application serves as a useful prompt for thinking about the components that have been or are becoming essential to conducting business and other activities on the internet.”
In her research, Professor Trimble focuses on intellectual property and issues at the intersection of intellectual property and private international law/conflict of laws.
