Introduction

• Author: David R. Gerk - John M. Fleming
• Pages: 1-3

Section 1

Introduction

1

Those who dare to fail miserably can achieve greatly.

— John F. Kennedy

35th President of the United States

Perhaps no area of law evolves at the pace with which intellectual prop-

erty law evolves. Like the inventors, businesses, artists, and writers that

rely upon intellectual property law to provide protections for their work

and value to their toils, intellectual property law continues to revise and

update itself to keep pace. While human ingenuity and creativity contin-

ues to prove we as a human race will seemingly never cease innovating,

creating, and evolving, the magnitude of our creations sometimes make

us wonder what could be left to create? It is rumored that in 1899 the

Commissioner of the U.S. Office of Patents stated, “everything that can

be invented has been invented.” Since then the airplanes took flight (1903),

assembly line manufacturing took shape (1913), insulin (1921) was ex-

tracted and prepared resulting in its availability for diabetics, and lasers

were fired (1958). More recently smart phones, electric cars, the human

genome project, Google,® Facebook,® and Twitter®—concepts that were

even a stretch for science fiction novels—have become realities.

It has been several decades now since intellectual property issues were

merely matters of interest to a small number of attorney specialists practic-

ing law in obscurity. Intellectual property rights today are front-page news.

Intellectual property (IP) is subject matter that touches everyone’s life

regardless of profession, socio-economic standing, or nationality and whether

or not it is recognized. From an economic and business perspective, The

Economist has reported that up to 75 percent of the value of a U.S. pub-