Posts Tagged: "hall of fame"

The U.S. Department of Commerce’s United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and the National Inventors Hall of Fame today announced the inductees for 2013. This year’s class includes inventors behind patented innovations such as the electronic synthesizer, flat panel plasma displays, iris recognition technology, and the code providing the foundation for 3G cellular systems. This year’s induction ceremony will take place on May 1, 2013 at the USPTO’s headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia.

One of the more indelible images of the civil rights movement are those from the Spring of 1968 as Black sanitation workers went on strike in Memphis, Tennessee holding signs that read “I am a Man,” in their fight for economic equality. (This is the reason that civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. was visiting Memphis when he was assassinated on April 4, 1968.) Now those signs should not only read “I am a Man Who Thinks,” but “I am a Man Who Thinks and My Thoughts are Valuable.” Thus, a skillful IP attorney can be a modern day civil rights attorney by aiding Blacks to create IP rights in order to preserve their exclusive right to economically exploit the fruits of their creativity.

Many may initially wonder what IP has to do with civil rights. After all, IP rights (IPR) have always been understood in terms of individual economic incentives for creating society-wide public good in the form of cultural works, like art and music, and scientific knowledge such as medicines. The interrelationship initially seems odd because, regardless of political leanings, many are turned off by any mention or use of identity politics. Yet, as one leading scholar observed, “we cannot understand intellectual property today without recognizing the identity struggles embedded within it. Intellectual property’s convergence with identity politics reveals links between cultural representation and development, which traditional economic analyses of intellectual property overlook.” Thus, I ask should IPR be the new focal point of the civil rights movement in America?

In celebration of its mission to recognize and foster invention, the National Inventors Hall of Fame has announced its 2012 Inductees. The inventors to be honored this year created remarkable innovations that include the now ubiquitous laser printer commonly found in the workplace, the thin-film head technology that has contributed to the success of the disk drive industry, and the first statin which pioneered the class of drugs targeted at lowering cholesterol.

AIPLA is proud to announce that Executive Director Q. Todd Dickinson will be inducted into the IP Hall of Fame for 2012. The IP Hall of Fame was created in 2006 by Intellectual Asset Management magazine to identify and honor individuals who have helped to establish intellectual property as one of the key business assets of the 21st century.