A web article comment today via Find Lawyers from a “petrovyoung” reminds me how abstract and concrete thought can be two sides of the same coin. In practical terms it is a reminder also that clients should often have very open conversations with their lawyers about what precisely is their intellectual property.
Without open conversations clients and their lawyers can settle for mundane IP. This won’t get them very far, but can give the client pipe dreams and earn the lawyer money. Every week we come across poor brands and domain names, crap patent applications, or mediocre materials from which people imagine they can build a copyright-based business.
The comment I received today was for my article titled Predictions 2009: Intellectual Property Law.
It’s long, it’s deep. It’s inspired by the great Paul Goldstein book, Intellectual Property: The Tough New Realities That Could Make Or Break Your Business (New York: Portfolio (Penguin Group), 2007.
A warning, the comment by Find Lawyers is also necessarily deep, indeed dense and philosophical:
“The formulation of property may seem clever or distant from the practical imperative of the sustainability of human landscapes. Yet how we see property has important outcomes for how we treat our landscape and its resources. Rather than being cumbered by existing images, alternative reconceptualisations present fresh opportunities for property to reconnect with place and the physicality of our surroundings, and in the process remove the shackles of abstraction. This article canvasses the expansive concept of property battalion, and its implications for recontextualising property with place. It canvasses the respective strengths and weaknesses of property in the diversity of its forms, and questions a number of fundamental propositions that lie at the intersection of property and the human environment.”
Please keep reading, I assure you it gets less abstract here on!
Find Lawyers has concerns that may diverge from my article, which was largely about my response to Goldstein’s vision of past and future history and philosophy behind copyright law (Goldstein’s speciality is copyright law).
But if Find Lawyers sees those messages in the article and Goldstein’s work, then I’m very impressed.
I say that because Goldstein’s book, and the intellectual property work we do in our firm, sometimes requires us to challenge clients to think outside their mental box. Outside their box of concrete or fixed conceptions of what is now, or could be in future, their intellectual property.
With these conversations we stand a better chance of getting beyond mundane IP. Ho hum stuff that achieves little.
As intellectual property specialist lawyers, some of our best work is abstract… until a contract we draft or an IP registration we achieve secures our client’s IP as if it was money in the bank. (Caution: money in banks is never 100% secure.)
So think about your intellectual property, recognise Intellectual property is not a thing, and call us for an open conversation. There’s no charge for the first conversation. 🙂
Contact us with any questions or requests.
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