The Objects of Our Lives and Their (IP) Stories

An entertaining history of intellectual property

A HISTORY OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY IN 50 OBJECTS
Edited by Claudy Op den Kamp and Dan Hunter
450 pp. Cambridge University Press
$34.95 Hardback

Sweet memories of childhood. Kicking a soccer ball around with your friends. Playing with Barbies and LEGO® blocks. Listening to the latest hits on your mix tape. Watching cartoons Saturday morning and football games on Sunday afternoon. And on rainy days, maybe a trip to the museum. These are some of the things we or our children did that bring back warm memories. No wonder advertisers use them to draw strong associations with their products. Time to kick back and have a Coke!

Each one of memories involved some object that we see and interact with, and that object has an intellectual property story to tell. Some of those stories date back thousands of years and some come from changes in our world during recent times. They are the stories of invention, human ingenuity, and the battles to protect creativity. They are the stories of intellectual property.

IP Has Moved To Center Stage

Mention intellectual property to most people and you can see their eyes glaze over. Yet, intellectual property has become the modern battleground. Tech titans wage wars over our phones, our music, and our drugs. Even the normally quiet world of academia gets involved, as patents that can lead to millions in royalties become the object of dispute (witness the patent battle over the revolutionary gene-editing technology, CRISPR-Cas9, between the University of California, Berkeley and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard).

Epic courtroom fights affect what we can buy and who we can buy it from. Intellectual property is at the forefront of battles between nations (e.g., the U.S. versus China). Yet, despite all the ways that intellectual property affects our lives, books about intellectual property never make the best-seller list. Even intellectuals shun works on intellectual property (the august Harvard Law Review has not published an article on intellectual property in over 30 years). All that is about to change.

Teaching Us IP Through Stories

Claudy Op den Kamp is Senior Lecturer in Film and faculty member at the Centre for Intellectual Property Policy and Management at Bournemouth University, UK, and Adjunct Research Fellow at Swinburne Law School, Australia. An authority on copyright and film, Op den Kamp knows that we learn much of what we know through storytelling. Dan Hunter is the founding dean of Swinburne Law School. His expertise lies in internet law, intellectual property and cognitive science models of law. Of particular note is his research in cultural histories of intellectual property in the postwar period.

Op den Kamp and Hunter have joined forces to curate 50 chapters, two co-authored by Hunter, one authored by by Op den Kamp, and the rest by intellectual property scholars from around the world. Grouped into four historical periods, the chapters move us from The Pre-Modern Period to the Digital Now, and from Goryeo Celadon (where did that unusual green color come from) to Bitcoin, the mysterious cryptocurrency.

Each of the 50 chapters in A History of Intellectual Property in 50 Objects reads as a short story. Accompanied by colorful pictures of things that will stir memories, the chapters tell the story of common objects — the soccer ball, the Barbie® doll, LEGO blocks, audio cassette tapes, footballs, the Coca-Cola bottle — and how intellectual property played a roll in the life of that object. The bring intellectual property to life.

Giving IP Its Rightful Status

Law has gotten a bad rap in this age of “alternative facts” and distrust of experts. With artificial intelligence, it becomes harder to tell the genuine from the fake. The consequences of this loss of reality grow each day. Buying a pair of knock-off “Nike” kicks may seem like an innocent thing (though far from it). But finding out that the brand-name medicine you bought online is fake may be a killer (literally).

The Founding Fathers when crafting the U.S. Constitution thought the idea of intellectual property so fundamental to the new country that they chose to spend some of the U.S. Constitution’s 4,543 words on it.

Article I Section 8 | Clause 8 — Patent and Copyright Clause of the Constitution. [The Congress shall have power] * * * To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.

Intellectual property goes beyond protecting the output of the creative among us. It has its dark side (drug manufacturers using endless patent tweaks and extensions to keep extending their monopolies). But the good side is powerful. It helps us define the good from the bad, the real from the fake, the harmful from the helpful.

Enjoying IP History Your Way

Op den Kamp and Hunter recognize that many of the stories in A History of Intellectual Property in 50 Objects may tempt the reader to skip the cover-to-cover approach. They provide several roadmaps for your journey through the book. I found myself jumping around, from story to story, picking out the ones that resonated with my life and filling in here and there, with unfamiliar tales. The chapter on the Coca-Cola® bottle tells us how it came to be — an iconic shape that instantly identifies the brand (especially for those of us who grew up in the 50s and 60s) and signaled a cool, refreshing drink.

That chapter brought back memories of my early years practicing law. The first firm I joined out of law school represented Chapman S. Root and the bottling company his family owned, the largest Coca-Cola bottling company in the U.S. It was Chapman’s grandfather, Chapman J. Root, who owned the Root Glass Company that designed the Coca-Cola bottle. Our firm represented them and many other bottlers in their battles with The Coca-Cola Company over rights to various trademarks in the bottlers’ territories. Outside my office were file cabinets filled with the history of the trademark battles.

I moved to the chapter on the Singer® Sewing machine. My mother (and my wife) love to sew. I have many childhood memories of my mother turning out curtains for a room, quilts, and Halloween costumes for me on her Singer Sewing machine tucked into a corner of our house.

The chapter on LEGO blocks reminded me of our children growing up. They would spend hours on a rainy day assembling forts, villages, and unusual creations from the giant box filled with the colorful plastic blocks. It also reminded me that walking through our house at night with the lights out was something to avoid, unless you were prepared to step on one of those colorful blocks and endure the pain.

And so it goes as you move from chapter to chapter. Each one teaches you a bit more about intellectual property. The knowledge you pick up along the way becomes bound to objects that have shaped (and continue to shape) your life.

A Book For Everyone

Stories connect us, to each other and to our past. Everyone loves a good story. Op den Kamp and Hunter have found a way to use the power of stories to connect us intellectually as well as emotionally with the objects of our past and present. By doing so, they have transcended the “this is a book for lawyers” category and compiled a book that is for everyone. They have found a way to take a complex topic and turn it into a collection of historical short stories that anyone can read and enjoy (plus, sitting on a table in your home or office, it’s eye-catching cover is a great conversation starter).

Ken Grady is an author writing about innovation, leadership, and the future of the legal industry. He is has been featured as a Top Writer on Medium in Artificial Intelligence, Innovation, and Leadership. He is an Adjunct Professor and Research Fellow at Michigan State University College of Law where his current research focuses on the digital transformation of law and the legal industry. He is on the Advisory Boards for Elevate Services, MDR Lab and LARI, Ltd. You can follow him on Twitter, connect with him on LinkedIn, and follow him on Facebook.