Indiana real estate buyers - get it in writing.

        Indiana's court of appeals rendered a Crawfordsville pizza owner's land contract no good. The buyer and the seller did have a written contract. The pizza operator was to buy the real estate where it did business on contract. The written deal required payments to the seller for just under 3 years. After 3 years the buyer was to pay off the balance of the purchase price, what is called a balloon payment.

       The pizza operator did not make the final payment. He argued that there was an oral agreement to extend the loan. The seller disagreed. The court ruled that all land sale contracts AND any modifications to those contracts MUST be in writing. This according to Indiana's Statute of Frauds.

       Any real estate buyer, especially one getting financing from the seller, should demand that all negotiations be done in writing.

The case is Huber v. Hamilton (2015)

Always incorporate!

In a recent federal court case it became obvious that only an inventor's expressly made description of an invention is relied upon by the public. So, what if there are certain portions of the application that are not expressly used by the inventor as the application process proceeds?

In Dunnhumby, the inventor filed a first patent application. Then he filed a second patent application based on the first. He failed to expressly include the first in the second. Later, he sued for infringement of his software patent.

The inventor wanted his custom definition for the word "Query" from his first application to apply in his second. The court refused to do so, advising that the file information in the application's folder is "intrinsic" to the patent. Anything else is extrinsic and not something the public would have necessarily known.

To circumvent this, always include a specific incorporation by reference in any patent applications that are subsequent to a prior application for the same invention.