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Table of Contents
This Week's Patent News:
🔒 BMW Wins Antisuit TRO Against Onesta (U.S. jurisdiction involved). A U.S. judge granted BMW a temporary restraining order blocking Onesta from enforcing Munich‑based patent actions in ways that could interfere with U.S. proceedings. Why it matters: Classic cross‑border patent‑litigation tension — antisuit injunctions are rare and strategically powerful.
🎮 Nintendo Wins Damages in Mannheim Game‑Controller Patent Case. Nintendo secured nearly €7M in damages in a long‑running controller‑technology patent dispute, with the court accepting a lost‑profits theory without overhead deductions.
☀️ Solar Panel Patent Wars Intensify; CAT Hit with U.S. ITC & Texas Suits. Maxeon filed its third patent suit against Aiko Solar in Munich, while Caterpillar (CAT) simultaneously faced new infringement actions in the U.S. ITC and Eastern District of Texas.
⚖️ Federal Circuit Issues Multiple Patent Opinions. The Federal Circuit released several precedential and non‑precedential opinions, including a key patent‑infringement ruling in Wonderland Switzerland AG v. Evenflo Company, Inc.
🖼️ Getty vs. Stability AI Heads Back to Appeals Court. Getty’s revived copyright‑and‑AI lawsuit against Stability AI returned to the Court of Appeal, raising novel questions about AI‑generated content and copyright boundaries.
New weekly USPTO Patents data have been added.
Top Inventors:
Tao Luo - 8
Hengcai Chen - 6
Armando Montalvo - 6
Xiaoxia Zhang - 6
Shota Aoyagi - 5
Anthony Michael Ashcroft - 5
Marine C. Bataille - 5
Abidur Rahman Chowdhury - 5
Clara Geneviève Marine Courtaigne - 5
Jonathan Gomez Garcia - 5
M. Evans Hankey - 5
Julian Jaede - 5
Duncan Robert Kerr - 5
Benjamin Andrew Shaffer - 5
Joe Sung-Ho Tan - 5
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🚫🎓➡️🚀 How One Family’s Loss Sparked the Birth of Silicon Valley’s Innovation Machine
In the spring of 1884, Leland and Jane Stanford faced the kind of loss that collapses entire worlds: their only son, 15-year-old Leland Jr., died suddenly of typhoid while traveling in Italy. At a time when the East Coast defined academic prestige and the Ivy League shaped America’s intellectual elite, the Stanford’s made a radical decision.
If they could no longer build a future for their son, they would create a future in his name.
Within months, the couple chartered a new university in the rolling farmland of Palo Alto, 3,000 miles from Harvard’s brick towers (Harvard is the oldest university in the US, founded in 1636) and far from the classical model dominating American higher education. Their founding vision, signed into law in 1885, was revolutionary for its time:
tuition-free
coeducational
nonsectarian
and unapologetically focused on the mechanical arts, engineering, and applied science
While the famous Harvard snub story makes for great dinner-table drama, historians agree it never happened. The truth is far more compelling: Stanford wasn’t born out of rejection; it was born out of ambition. The Stanford’s weren’t trying to mirror the Ivy League; they were trying to invent something entirely new.
And it worked.
By the late 20th century, Stanford wasn’t just another university; it was the nerve center of Silicon Valley. A place where electrical engineering labs turned into venture-backed startups, where professors co-founded companies, and where dorm-room ideas grew into global platforms.
Since 1976, Stanford has generated 5,309 U.S. patents (through 12/23/2025).
Harvard, by comparison, sits at 2,963 (through 12/23/2025).
Innovation loves sunshine.
Google, Yahoo, LinkedIn, IDEO, Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard, and even the early architecture behind GPS all trace part of their lineage back to Stanford’s campus. The school didn’t produce presidents; it produced industries.
So next time your app loads instantly, your car updates its software over the air, or your maps guide you through traffic, remember: all of this began with two grieving parents who believed education could spark an entirely new world.
They didn’t build a university.
They built a launchpad.
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🌟 The untold backstories of world-changing inventions
📈 Real data and deep patent insights you won’t find anywhere else
💡 Innovation lessons you can actually apply
🧠 Stories that make you think, laugh, and get inspired again
If you love learning how ideas turn into breakthroughs, and how ordinary people become extraordinary inventors, then join the newsletter trusted by 48,000+ innovators across the world.
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Trivia
Who patented the first automatic windshield wiper in 1903?
A) Mary Anderson
B) Margaret Knight
C) Grace Murray Hopper
D) Florence Lawrence
Please scroll to the bottom of this newsletter to find out.
Featured Inventor
How Ali Ghodsi Turned a Research Project into a Global Data Powerhouse
Ali Ghodsi, the CEO and co-founder of Databricks, is one of the quiet architects of today’s data and AI revolution.
Born in Iran and raised in Sweden, he earned his PhD in computer science at KTH Royal Institute of Technology before joining UC Berkeley’s AMPLab.
There, he and a small team of researchers created Apache Spark, the open-source engine that transformed big-data processing with unprecedented speed and simplicity.
But Spark’s real breakthrough came in 2013, when Ghodsi helped launch Databricks to make advanced data tooling accessible to everyday enterprises.
As CEO, he championed the lakehouse architecture, unifying data lakes and warehouses into one streamlined system that powers modern AI workflows. Under his leadership, Databricks grew into a multibillion-dollar powerhouse serving thousands of companies worldwide. Ghodsi embodies a new kind of Silicon Valley success story, an academic turned operator who made data behave and reshaped the future of cloud computing.
Today in Patent History
🔧⚡ The Spark Before the Bulb: Edison’s Magneto-Electric Breakthrough
On December 23, 1879, Thomas Edison secured a pivotal patent for his Magneto-Electric Machine, a device designed to dramatically improve the efficiency of a revolving armature.
While not as famous as the light bulb he would unveil just days later, this invention played a crucial supporting role in Edison’s electrical ambitions. By boosting power generation and stability, the Magneto-Electric Machine helped lay the groundwork for reliable electric lighting and early power distribution systems. It was a quiet but essential engineering leap, one of those lesser-known Edison innovations that helped electrify the world long before the grid we know today.
U.S. Patent No. 222,881
Introducing New Data Products and Enhancements
💡From INVENT to INVEST — Just One Letter (and One Vault) Away |
INVENT and INVEST are nearly identical. Swap the N for an S, and you turn ideas into impact. |
And bridging the gap is the UpFront Research Reports Vault, your toolkit to transform invention into opportunity.
Antimatter is the most valuable substance ever created, costing an estimated $62.5 trillion per gram, because it must be manufactured atom by atom and releases 100 percent of its mass as energy when it meets normal matter. Though only tiny amounts can be produced and stored today, researchers believe it could one day transform deep space propulsion and advanced medical technologies.
This UpFront Research report (for paid Vault subscribers) provides a comprehensive analysis of the patent landscape surrounding antimatter technologies, revealing significant trends, promising research areas, and potential applications across various sectors. The examination of patents has highlighted a growing interest in antimatter production, storage, containment, and propulsion systems, particularly in aerospace, healthcare, and energy generation. |
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Smart Brevity is the methodology behind Axios — designed to make every message memorable, clear, and impossible to ignore. Our free toolkit includes the checklist, workbooks, and frameworks to start using it today.
Centurion Patentors
Congratulations to last week's Centurion Patentors! |
The Centurion Patentors are 0.185% of ALL Inventors worldwide who hold more than one hundred U.S. patents. They are the Navy SEALs of innovation. They don’t just have good ideas once; they’ve built a discipline, a repeatable process for turning thought into impact. |
We are excited to welcome the following inventors into these prestigious patent clubs: |
Trivia
Answer: A) Mary Anderson ✅
🚗 Anderson’s invention came after seeing trolley drivers stop to wipe snow by hand—an idea initially dismissed as “unnecessary.”
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