the Zealous

Selected excerpts from the most recent edition of Landslide, the ABA Intellectual Property Section’s flagship publication, and the articles and authors from which they are lifted:

[W]hen you start a business as an entrepreneur or inventor, it’s all about managing a relationship between risk and reward. There’s obviously a huge amount of risk and uncertainty in starting a company or developing a product. But the reward, the ability to get a patent …, is the reason why entrepreneurs and investors are willing to assume that risk. With a strong patent system, there’s greater certainty that a patent is going to issue and then that patent is going to kind of stand the test of time ….

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In his 2018 book, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, David Graebe, anthropologist and an early founder of the Occupy Wall Street movement, recounts the rise in the last century of “bullshit jobs”: occupations that serve no socially useful function, and instead cause soul-crushing psychological suffering to those forced to take on such work. Graebe contends that as much as forty percent of all jobs in the world are bullshit, which he defines as:

a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.

Graeber catalogs five different species of bullshit jobs: flunkies, goons, duct tapers, box tickers, and taskmasters. He indicts all “corporate lawyers” as falling into the “goons” category.

Big companies have procurement departments that use supplier contracts that contain clauses like this (from an actual big company supplier agreement (presented as "non-negotiable") for the purchase of off-site services, and one that already imposes robust confidentiality obligations on the supplier):

Supplier will: (a) designate one employee to be in charge of Supplier’s information security program; (b) maintain adequate physical security of all premises in which BIGCO Information will be processed and/or stored including that physical media containing such records is stored in locked facilities, storage areas or containers; (c) implement reasonable precautions with respect to the employment of, and access given to, Supplier personnel and contractors, including background checks; screening; security clearances that assign specific access privileges to individuals; training and security awareness programs for personnel and contractors; monito

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