Patent Law

The Invisible Edge

By Gary Odom and Jordan Kuhn

It's refreshing to read a patent study that stands up and shouts sense. Mark Blaxill and Ralph Eckardt, in "The Innovation Imperative: Building America's Invisible Edge for the 21st Century" look to the past as a candle to light the way forward. They begin by quoting Mark Twain (pictured) in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, 1889: "The very first official thing I did in my administration--and it was on the very first day of it too--was to start a patent office; for I knew that a country without a good patent office and good patent laws was just a crab, and couldn't travel any way but sideways or backwards."

The executive summary posits the peril faced by this country from those with an anti-patent agenda, and those in Congress legislating in ignorance.

Today, the chief export of the U.S. economy is innovation. American inventors have built a strategic reserve of intellectual property rights that is every bit as strategic as our domestic energy reserves - in our view, it is America's "invisible edge." In fact, the American economy, now reeling from the mortgage crisis and its ripple effects, has typically found its most sustainable competitive advantage in precisely this resource: innovation.

The single exception was one tragic period from the 1950s through the 1970s when overconfident regulators squandered American innovation assets. Their misguided policy interventions gave away American know-how to overseas competitors at fire-sale prices, compromising our national competitiveness and economic well-being.

 Today we are in danger of repeating those mistakes.

Policymakers appear not to have learned the lessons of history. In recent years, the American patent system, long one of our greatest institutional strengths, has come under increasing attack, with policymakers not only leaving this strategic reserve undefended, but also in some cases actively undermining its integrity.

A well-crafted historical perspective is provided, illustrating the growth of prosperity blossoming from innovation, and its withering from officious misguided bureaucratic power. The villain of the piece is the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), who, in the name of antitrust, illicitly gave away America's edge in several key technical areas. The FTC continues the tradition today of misanthropic hatred of patents as "anti-competitive."

This fact-filled, insightful and thought-provoking paper richly rewards the reader with the hard lessons of history, and solid suggestions for protecting America's invisible edge. Crucial reading.

Even better, this paper whets the appetite for their book, due next month: The Invisible Edge: Taking Your Strategy to the Next Level Using Intellectual Property.

Full post as published by The Patent Prospector on February 06, 2009 (boomark / email).