Patent Law

Conflict and Cooperation

By Gary Odom and Jordan Kuhn

Culture and law intersect at the personal level. Everybody lives in the two worlds simultaneously. But lawyers often behave as if there is no world but law.

This was not a mistake made by the Founding Fathers of this nation. To be fair to us today, except for one day in September of 2001, we have not had much visceral experience with how conflicts between culture and law may result in violence. But the Founding Fathers lived much of their lives in such conflict. And their fathers had lived much of their lives in conflict (that between church and state).

And how did the Founding Fathers choose to act when faced with the question of how man should be governed? I submit that their answer was to build a government that required people to cooperate. Our systems of checks and balances are so valuable not for their salutory effect on law, but for their salutory effect on culture. To give but one example, freedom of speech has not helped us by permitting a man to say what he likes; rather, it has helped by forcing a man to listen to what he hates.

It is the cultural norm of cooperation that forms our constitution, both literally and figuratively. It is the cultural norm of cooperation that has permitted the United States to grow and prosper to a scale beyond all nations in the history of mankind. It is the cultural norm of cooperation that is most threatened at times when we choose sides, commit ourselves to theories, and refuse to listen and see facts that might lead us to change our theories, and later our actions.

Among many others in this once great nation, the culture of patent law has devolved into a norm of conflict because of a great misunderstanding about what intellectual property is. In the spirit of cooperation that helped forge our constitution, let us learn to cooperate in promoting the progress of science and the useful arts by granting to authors and inventors fair value for their work. There has never been a time in our history in which the fate of patent law has been more in question.

Full post as published by The Patent Prospector on May 18, 2008 (boomark / email).