What do Potholes, Submarines and Earbuds have in Common?

Dominic Woolrych CEO

Dominic is the CEO of Lawpath, dedicating his days to making legal easier, faster and more accessible to businesses. Dominic is a recognised thought-leader in Australian legal disruption, and was recognised as a winner of the Australian Legal Innovation Index and recently a winner of the LexisNexis 40 Under 40 (APAC).

31 August 2015

Short answer: intellectual property protection.

It has been busy in the exciting world of intellectual property protection.

Here is a rundown of some exciting developments.

Google’s pothole solution

Google has patented a system of marking the position of potholes with GPS and motion sensor technology. Using this information, Google will be able to redirect you to the smoothest route, or alert you to avoid particular sections of a road. Hopefully this becomes a crowdsourced tech that gets shared with the government, so our tax dollars can be put to good use.

Shape-shifting drone-marine

Boeing just patented new technology that sees a drone change into a submarine upon entry into the water.

On breaking the water surface, the irrelevant parts fall off the drone, and the submarine will be able to conduct reconnaissance. When that’s done, it swims back to the surface to beam the information to the mothership. “Beam me up, Scotty!”

If you’re a “why read the book when I can watch the movie” type person, here’s a good video of how it will work.

“Swipe to Unlock”

Germany’s top civil court ruled, on the 25th of August, that Apple’s “Swipe to Unlock” feature is not an inventive step, finding in favour of Motorola Mobility Holdings Ltd. This means that Apple’s patent application is unsuccessful, and it will not get protection for that feature.

Apple’s noise-cancelling solution

Apple’s patent application for new noise-cancelling wireless earbuds technology was made public this week. It incorporates bone conduction technology, and has internal microphones in the earbuds that collects data on noise and wind level. This data is combined with other information like the position of the earbuds to provide listening heaven.

Anything that makes listening to Taylor Swift better makes me happy.

Learn more about “What is a Patent?” and “The Patent Application Process”.

To find out more about how you can protect your invention, or to sing a Swifty song for us, give us a call on 1800 LAWPATH.

Let us know what you think about the developments by tagging us #lawpath or @lawpath