Anti-Intellectual Property Rights Law

Today in class yet another student mentioned he had sunk a fortune, well, $60K, into intellectual property rights for his product. My rule of thumb is if you have spent over nine months or $900 getting to the point you have enough orders in hand from customers to cover the suppliers' minimum, in a workable amount of time, profitably, then something is wrong. Email me and I'll point it out. the fellow lamented he had not taken my class first.

This begged the question, do people who have massive sunk costs in IPR become reticent about redesign of their product, redesign based on customer feedback? Enough redesign and you need a new patent... are people inclined to die with their investment, so to speak?

Along those lines, when the firs iPods came out, I caught wind of websites where you could buy iPods from the factory that made them for Apple. You could buy the software from the codewriters who wrote ipod software for Apple. You could put the two together at a lower cost than buying directly from Apple.

Too few people did so to make it a viable operation. Apple marketing, not IPR is what protects Apple. We do not need an IPR regime in USA.

Either of these two points might make good master's theses for an MBA candidate.

Bookmark this post --- Email this post