Denis, while I was going through SEC filings I ran across this refernce to their patents, and remembered that you had a question regarding them. This is from their 10K (Annual Report '96) and it only describes 10 patents so it looks like they have been issued a few more recently.
Also, in post #10 I listed Gradium lens sales for the last 4 quarters. I should have said lenses and "other". I don't know what the other is, but I wanted to correct myself. It doesn't include licenses and govt. grants.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
The Company's policy is to protect its technology by, among other things, patents, trade secrets, trademarks and copyrights. As of June 1996, the Company had ten issued U.S. patents, four foreign patents and had filed applications for four additional U.S. patents. Patents have been issued and/or patent applications have been filed in the areas of glass composition, gradient geometries, production processes and product design. One of the Company's issued patents expires in 2006, two in 2007, one in 2008, three in 2010, two in 2012 and one in 2013. Patent applications corresponding to LightPath's U.S. applications have been filed in the patent offices in Europe and Japan pursuant to the Patent Cooperation Treaty ("PCT). Under the PCT, a patent applicant may file one patent application and have it acknowledged as an accepted filing in as many member nations to the PCT as the applicant elects.
In addition to patent protection, certain process inventions and innovations are retained as trade secrets. A key feature of GRADIUM is that, once fabricated, it does not reveal its formula upon inspection and cannot be reverse-engineered. LightPath(R) is now registered as a service mark in the United States; registrations for LightPath(TM), GRADIUM and other trademarks are pending. The Company intends to register these trademarks in key foreign jurisdictions. |
