Toy manufacturers and toy inventors use both utility and design patents, along with trademarks and copyrights. In fact, many toys especially video games take advantage of all three types of intellectual property protection. Visit our collection of famous toy patents and photos. Image: Federal Art Project

Want to know what to give an inquiring mind for Christmas or any other special occasion? How about a book about gadgets or inventing, or books on the popular topics of television history, history of cars, biographies of Bill Gates. Need a gift idea for a kid inventor? What about a science fair kit? Image Courtesy: African American Inventors - Publishers John Wiley & Sons Inc

Well, if you live where I do you are. And that makes me think of all the inventions that have to do with ice. We don't know who invented the first ice skates, however, the largest outdoor ice skating rink is the Fujikyu Highland Promenade Rink in Japan. This rink was built in 1967 and boasts an ice area of 165,750 square feet or 3.8 acres. Did you know that the first artificial ice rink (mechanically-refrigerated) was built in 1876, in London, England? The rink was named the Glaciarium. The rules of modern ice hockey were written by Canadian J G A Creighton in 1875. Ice hockey rinks are cleaned by a Zamboni and I have always wanted to ride a Zamboni. The Zamboni is the namesake of its inventor Frank Zamboni. Zamboni ® Trademark Used with permission of Frank J. Zamboni & Co. Inc. 1998

For anyone who watches TV, it's hard to miss those commercial pitches to "call now" for a "special offer" on the latest "amazing" products. Ever wonder whether your invention has what it takes to be pitched in primetime (or in the middle of the night, on basic cable)?

Recently, a group of individual investors got the chance to pitch their products at the New Product Showcase at the Electronic Retailing Association's annual convention in Las Vegas. The ERA, a trade group for direct-to-consumer marketers (those known for products like The Snuggie, Oxiclean, and the Topsy Turvy tomato planter), partnered with inventor-service company InventHelp to organize a showcase of new inventions, allowing individual inventors to exhibit their products and while networking with other attendees.

Within the showcase, a panel of ERA members, including representatives from QVC and Guthy-Renker, searched for "The Top 6 Pitchable" products of the year. Participating inventors got their two minutes in the spotlight, explaining why their product is the next big necessity. Some inventors even got a shot in front of the cameras, shilling to a crew from the TV show, Pitchmen. The show's creators from the Discovery Channel are not only looking for interesting inventors, but also for a new pitchman or pitchwoman to replace the former host, Billy Mays.

InventHelp is planning a similar showcase at the next ERA convention. So start thinking: What would you sell on TV?

The description, together with the claims, are often referred to as the specification. As the words suggests, these are the sections of the patent application where you specify what your machine or process is and how it differs from previous patents and technology.

The drawing to the left is an actual drawing from a patent and is described in the patent in the following way - - Fig. 1 is a semi-diagrammatic view of a tent and tent frame according to one embodiment of the invention, showing the tent as erected;

This year (2009) Thanksgiving Day, a bit of a roving holiday, falls on November 26. Did you know that "MACY'S THANKSGIVING DAY PARADE" is a word mark? That's a registered trademark - Registration Number 2206890.

Food often takes center stage at Thanksgiving, and there are many well-known Thanksgiving-related products protected by patents and trademarks. One way to spend more time with family and less in the kitchen cleaning up is by using a disposable cooking pan (patent #5,628,427) or a cooking jacket (patent #4,942,809) for the turkey, ham or roast. One non-traditional, but increasingly popular, way to cook a turkey is deep-frying, and one type of equipment used in this preparation is protected by patent # 5,758,569.

Some well-known trademarks associated with turkey and dressing, must-haves at many Thanksgiving tables, are Butterball (registration #1151836) for turkey products. What holiday feast would be complete without cranberry sauce such as Ocean Spray (registration #2150919) Desserts are always the final complement to a Thanksgiving feast. For those that do not bake their own, Sara Lee's slogan for its pies and cakes, "Nobody Doesn't Like Sara Lee," is protected by a trademark (registration #1885156). Photo Credit: Erik Rank/Getty Images Illustration: Mary Bellis

• Thanksgiving Day Historic Documents, Photos, & Inventions
• Logo Designs - Thanksgiving Day Themes

Check it out. QVC has posted a message in our forum looking for new products.

Marc wrote to me asking for clarification about who invented cream cheese. Marc, after a bit more research I now have a name. In 1872, cream cheese was invented by American dairymen, William Lawrence of Chester, N.Y., who accidentally developed a method of producing cream cheese while trying to reproduce a French cheese called Neufchatel.

UC San Diego computer scientists have built a software program that can perform key duplication without having the key. Instead, the computer scientists only need a photograph of the key.

"We built our key duplication software system to show people that their keys are not inherently secret," said Stefan Savage, the computer science professor from UC San Diego's Jacobs School of Engineering who led the student-run project. "Perhaps this was once a reasonable assumption, but advances in digital imaging and optics have made it easy to duplicate someone's keys from a distance without them even noticing."

The bumps and valleys on your house or office keys represent a numeric code that completely describes how to open your particular lock. If a key doesn't encode this precise "bitting code," then it won't open your door.

In one demonstration of the new software system, the computer scientists took pictures of common residential house keys with a cell phone camera, fed the image into their software which then produced the information needed to create identical copies. In another example, they used a five inch telephoto lens to capture images from the roof of a campus building and duplicate keys sitting on a café table about 200 feet away.

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• History of Keys & Locks
• History of Software Programming
• Computer Timeline

Did you know that Apple Computers has so far been unable to patent the software interface of the iPod digital music player because of a prior filing by inventor John Platt, who submitted a patent application for a similar software design in May of 2002? Photo of iPod Family provided by Apple Computers.