On a Sunday evening, I gather my dogs, pour a glass of wine, fire up the grill, and repair to the deck with the Sunday New York Times. For a conservative, this is a guilty pleasure. But this week, I am afraid, it caused me to lose my religion.
A recent e-mail exchange with our Dean raised the following question: What team is a fan of the Milwaukee Brewers supposed to hate? This was the provocative statement: “My distaste for the Cubs meant that, even if the White Sox had lost to the Brewers this weekend, I could have seen something good in the matter.” Surely, to hate like this is to be happy forever. But who can we despise? And who will detest us?
The easy answer is the Cubs, but I have bad news. They are just not that into us. During last July’s four game debacle at Miller Park, I overheard a Cubs fan say that it would take years before he could hate us like he hates the Cardinals. Ours would be hate unrequited. Oh, sure, they might call and ridicule us when St. Louis isn’t around. We’d be just any port in a storm.
I often tell my students that Intellectual Property is like the “icing on the cake”—the “cake” being the structure created by a product or service to which Intellectual Property law (IP) applies. As I will elaborate in a future post, this is one of the reasons why I like IP so much. In other words, while the technical application of IP is undoubtedly complicated and challenging, IP is often just the last step of a production or creation process. It is like the icing on a cake — that final layer that ties everything together. Yet this layer is absolutely necessary to complete the work and often represents the sine qua non of why the public will buy the cake. It determines whether a product will be successful or not. This post, however, is not about IP theory . . . it is really about cakes, icing, and IP.