Thursday, December 16, 2010

Patent This Intellectual Property

Quite a bit of news has been going around Michigan these days, with the primary focus being the birth of baby Dean. Dean!

Aside from that, our longtime buddy and all around good guy, Kwame Kilpatrick was indicted for organized crime as well as his dad and a few other fantastic people who run in the Kilpatrick circle. I have no idea how his mom has not yet been named in anything. If I was running or a significant part of an organized, or even disorganized, crime organization, I am absolutely certain that my mom would be all over that. Moms know everything, and that has always been a little bit scary. There will be many more hilarious and enjoyable things to say about this story, hopefully ending in longer term incarceration of the Kilpatrick family.

In better news, the city of Detroit was tonight named to house the United States' first ever satellite office for the U.S. Patent and Trade Office. The current plan is for the office to employee about 100+ individuals. Detroit beat out some pretty big and substantial other likely contenders, including cities like Boston. I'll have to look up the specifics but I can't right now because I have a baby (best excuse ever from now on to not do something I should be doing), but Michigan is definitely a leader in patent applications because of the amount of R&D in the automotive industry that goes on here. Believe it or not, the auto industry is actually a pretty high tech industry with lots of innovation.

In addition to immediate personnel at the office, I would guess that there will be a pretty decent amount of tangential job creation to support the intellectual property legal work going on at this new location. Secretary of the Department of Commerce, Gary Locke, indicated that there were many reasons why they chose Detroit for this new office, and I choose to believe that "pity" was not one of these reasons. We are going to intellectual property the hell out of this country.

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