Every College Student's Dream: An 8 AM Class On Patents; Wired, January 20, 2018

David Kline, Wired; Every College Student's Dream: An 8 AM Class On Patents

[Kip Currier: Money quote from this Wired article making a very persuasive quantitative and qualitative argument for more Intellectual Property (IP) undergraduate courses--

 "...IP literacy is not just for lawyers anymore."

As a related aside: Reflecting an increasing student desire and need for IP education, two out of every three terms per academic year since 2009, I've been teaching an IP elective course to graduate students at Pitt's School of Information Sciences (now the School of Computing and Information). 

Additionally, in IP guest talks I've given for undergraduate students participating in Pitt's groundbreaking iSchool Inclusion Institute, it's been exciting to see first-hand many students' interest in augmenting their IP awareness...as well as more and more students creating and leveraging their own IP works!]

"Nor is there any doubt that IP plays a pivotal role in powering today’s knowledge economy, where intangible assets such as IP represent more than 80 percent of the market value of all publicly traded companies. Indeed, intellectual-property-intensive industries now account for a surprising 38.2 percent of total US GDP, according to a recent US Department of Commerce report. That’s more than $6 trillion a year, more than the GDP of any other nation except China. IP-based industries are also responsible for 30 percent, of national employment, or roughly 40 million jobs.

Yet despite IP's enormous role in the US economy, few universities offer any sort of course on IP to undergraduates. Among the first is the University of Southern California, which last fall launched a course on the basic workings of patents, copyrights, trademarks and trade secrets. The new course, through the Greif Center for Entrepreneurial Studies within USC’s Marshall School of Business, aims to train tomorrow’s leaders in the skills they need to navigate our increasingly IP-driven economy...

Put another way, just as tech literacy was once a requirement only for IT specialists but is now considered almost as essential as verbal literacy, IP literacy is not just for lawyers anymore.

All of which calls to mind that scene from the 1967 movie The Graduate, when Mr. McGuire (Walter Brooke) offers career advice to a young Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman)?

“Plastics!” he says. “There’s a great future in plastics.”

Half a century later, USC is demonstrating that intellectual property has become the new watchword for almost any career of the future."

The Importance of Intellectual Property to the U.S. Economy; Inside Counsel, 10/27/16

Amanda Ciccatelli, Inside Counsel; The Importance of Intellectual Property to the U.S. Economy:

"...[T]he U.S. Department of Commerce recently released a report that finds that intellectual property (IP)-intensive industries support at least 45 million U.S. jobs (about 30 percent of all the jobs in the country) and contribute over $6 trillion to, or 38.2 percent of, U.S. GDP. While IP is used in every segment of the economy, there are 81 industries that use patent, copyright, or trademark protections extensively.

Mauricio Uribe, partner at Knobbe Martens and Chris Eusebi, principal at Harness Dickey, sat down with Inside Counsel to discuss what top IP-focused law firms are seeing in terms of growth in specific industries and types of IP.

“There may be a limited number of organizations whose main function is to buy, sell, or license IP and in such create an IP industry,” Uribe explained. “However, other than this specific niche, we wouldn’t consider IP as an industry in itself. Rather, it is easier to consider IP as a factor that impacts almost every industry in some manner.”

Over the past five years, IP has supported close to 30 million jobs, representing almost a one percent increase in the number of jobs since 2010.

“In an economy where every job is important, innovation and intellectual property protections represent some of the most significant protections for American jobs and Internal Rate of Return for corporate business units,” said Eusebi.

Total employment supported by the IP-intensive industries, which are the jobs in patent, trademark, copyright, or IP-intensive industries plus supply-chain jobs equals over 45 million jobs in the U.S. economy. “These jobs clearly represent exports to the world economy that represent the inflow of capital into the U.S.”

“Lately, trademark protection represents a large percentage of licensing revenue. For sole employment, which represents a large percentage of the U.S. work force, copyrights effect over 15 percent of the workforce. While the number of jobs protected due to patent protection appears to have been reduced since 2000, these high paying jobs, mostly in manufacturing, are as important as ever,” said Eusebi."