A Career as a Paper Tiger, or:
What Does a Patent Attorney Do All Day?

The long answer to these questions given in the seminar will explain how important it is to protect your innovative assets/ innovations, which are most probably part of your everyday life at the Max Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics. Which of the multitude of intellectual property rights are best suited for protecting technical inventions? The seminar will give an overview of what exactly patents are and how they can be protectead. What kind of inventions can be protected and is my invention worth protecting? You will learn that a stroke of genius is not necessary to obtain a patent, but it must be ensured that your invention is not obvious to a person skilled in the art. After a short overview of the ways to and the benefits of IP protection, the career path to become a Patent Attorney will be briefly discussed and after that, a real-life example of the work a Patent Attorney is involved in on a daily basis will be discussed, explaining under which circumstances a certain technical invention is patentable (or not), thus giving a feeling of everyday life of a Patent Attorney and hopefully illustrating that a Patent Attorney is not a paper tiger after all.

The speaker: Benjamin Janutta holds a Diploma degree and a doctoral degree in Physics at the Hamburg University. During his studies, Benjamin worked at the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso (LNGS) in Assergi, Italy, where he was responsible for commissioning parts of the readout electronics of an international particle physics experiment investigating neutrino oscillations. As a postdoctoral researcher at the TU Dresden he was involved in investigating rare nuclear decays at LNGS using room-temperature CdZnTe semiconductor detectors. After a brief stint working for radiation protection at the Helmholtz Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf, Benjamin started his trainee position as a patent attorney in a Dresden satellite office of a Munich Patent Attorney Office. Ever since working in the IP field, Benjamin gained significant experience in a diverse field of technologies, especially in electronic engineering, particular communication engineering, 4G, 5G, software, and telecommunications, particularly wireless communications, including standard essential cases. Furthermore, Benjamin has experience in semiconductor technologies, display technologies, and artificial intelligence.