IP.com

Who was the only United States President to ever invent and patent an idea?
Like many people of his era, this person believed deeply in the value of personal initiative, inventiveness, and scientific and technological change. His mechanical and scientific interests began with his training as a surveyor in New Salem and continued throughout his life.

In 1848, he decided to try his own hand at developing an invention to lift boats grounded in shallow water. On May 22, 1849, he received a patent for his method of lifting boats over shoals. A trip to Niagara Falls inspired the design, when he witnessed a grounded boat being lifted over shallow waters. He produced the model with the help of Walter Davis, a Springfield mechanic. There is no evidence that he ever sought to put the idea into production. ANSWER: Abraham Lincoln.

During his career, which began at Eastman Kodak Co. in 1975, Joe Ma**co collaborated with other inventors and filed patents on new inventions in the realms of digital image processing, film and digital cameras, innovative digital displays, printers, and print-finishing systems. He has contributed to 251 granted U.S. patents, with assignees that have included Eastman Kodak, Kodak Alaris, Apple and Carestream Health.

Ma**co was one of the primary contributors to the Kodak Patent Portfolio, which was sold for $525 million. He later joined Kodak Alaris as a research scientist, where he helps protect corporate research investments with intellectual property.

He has been using IP.com solutions for 13 years and utilizes IP.com’s workflow-based AI technology for better results, greater efficiency, and reduced risk.

Ma**co says, "The biggest difference with using AI software is the speed at which an inventor can move from a rough thought to an informed conversation. Today, AI can very quickly surface terminology, adjacent approaches, prior art patterns, and technical context that might have taken days or weeks to assemble."

He goes on to say, "From there, the inventor should compare the concept against what is already known, refine the point of novelty, and document the most important variations. The best workflow is not 'ask AI for an invention.' It is 'use AI to interrogate, improve, and document a human insight,' he explains.

He goes on to say, "I’ve had an advantage using IP.com’s AI-powered platform as an early adopter years ago and became accustomed to describing my ideas in plain language, removing the manual convert concept to Boolean step. Now I can use AI to expand the vocabulary around the idea, identify related technologies, suggest alternate embodiments, and use Gist to surface curated prior art or analogous solutions. When you don’t know the prior art, everything seems patentable. A thorough prior art search makes the decision more evidence-based. Inventors are naturally optimistic, which is a strength, but optimism needs discipline. Early AI-assisted searching gives you a faster read on whether the space is open, crowded, or simply described using different language."

He was asked what can AI reveal early that inventors often used to discover too late?

He answered, "A plain-language Semantic Gist® search can reveal relevance-ranked prior art, and AI can reveal crowded technical areas, different terminology, adjacent solutions, and competing approaches very early."

"It can also show that the value may not be where the inventor first thought it was. Sometimes the original idea is not new, but a particular implementation, workflow, data structure, or use case is more interesting. That kind of early signal is valuable. It helps inventors avoid wasting time, and it helps them pivot toward the part of the idea that may actually be differentiated. For example, tools like IP.com’s Semantic Gist® search capabilities enable an engineer to see relevance-ranked prior art from plain language descriptions early in the development process. No need for complex Boolean search strings or waiting weeks for external search results."

It's an interesting article about a renowned inventor and how he uses our software to make the road to a patent much easier, faster, and more efficient.

Read more here: https://buff.ly/nu4VNoK

Why Patent Challengers Are Quietly Abandoning IPRs for Reexamination:
For more than a decade, the answer to "we've been sued for patent infringement" was reflexive: file an inter partes review. The IPR was the break-glass tool of the post-AIA era — expensive, adversarial, but predictable enough to manufacture settlement leverage and, with luck, a litigation stay. That reflex has become expensive to maintain, and the numbers are starting to show it. As of 2026, the data shows challengers walking away from the IPR in numbers no one anticipated, and walking toward a procedure most of them had mothballed years ago: ex parte reexamination.

This is a structural reordering of how patent validity gets challenged in the United States, and it changes the job description for anyone responsible for clearing prior art before a fight begins. Read the full blog post here: https://buff.ly/gqcLbTJ