Posts Tagged: "George Washington"

Donald Dunner: Looking Back On an IP Icon

Donald Dunner was born in 1931 and spent the first 17 years of his life growing up in New York City’s borough of Brooklyn. In a November 2009 interview published by Washington Lawyer, Dunner recalled his early love for the Brooklyn Dodgers, his family’s victory garden during World War II and his attendance at Stuyvesant High School, a well-respected NYC institution with a science-oriented curriculum. Upon graduating Stuyvesant, Dunner attended Purdue University, where he majored in chemical engineering and served as a fraternity president, sophomore class president and student body president. Dunner credited his work in student government with lighting his career path towards the legal profession and his engineering background led naturally to his patent law practice.

The Categorical Imperative for Innovation and Patenting

In his Categorical Imperative, Kant simplifies a moral argument position for an individual by asking a question: if you thought that your position or Statement would be Universal, i.e., applicable to all people, it would have the stance of a Categorical Imperative and thus you must do it. A proposed Categorical Imperative is the following Statement: creators should be protected against the unlawful taking of their creation by others… Allowing the free taking of ideas, content and valuable data, i.e., the fruits of individual intellectual endeavor, would disrupt capitalism in a radical way. The resulting more secretive approach in support of the above free-riding Statement would be akin to a Communist environment where the State owned everything and the citizen owned nothing, i.e., the people “consented” to this.