In response to my Reducing the Cost of IP Law, my friend and ex-colleague (and mentor) Steve Mendelsohn, a patent lawyer in Philadelphia, wrote me the following. N.B.: Steve is not a libertarian but is honest and smart, unlike patent shills (he’s also an excellent patent attorney, if you need one). Here’s an edited version of his comments, posted with his permission (for comments from another honest patent lawyer, see here):
An applicant’s résumé used to be everything. Type “resume writing” into the search line at Amazon and 4,468 results appear. Book after book containing hundreds of pages each, instructing the reader as to how he or she should put their best foot forward in a page or two.
It’s fun times these days to be a commodity trader / blogger. There is no mid-range to the comments. Most of the criticism or descending comments I get on anything I write about the role of commodity traders usually has the undertone of populist anger around TARP. I try to present a balanced argument to the anger that is misplaced on managers of commodity hedge funds and CTAs who get lumped in with the big banks who benefited from the bailout.
The owners of Peter Cooper Village and Stuyvesant Town in Manhattan have decided to give the property back to the lender. Tishman Speyer Properties and BlackRock Inc. paid $5.4 billion for the project at the height of the real estate bubble in 2006, borrowing $4.4 billion.
Folks might enjoy this wide ranging interview with Mark Skousen. Here Skousen shores up his Austrian geek bonafides:
My article “Intellectual Property and Libertarianism“ was published in the December, 2009 issue of Liberty; the March 2010 issue features the following exchange in the “Letters” section.p>
Philosophizing IP
No, not me. Michael F. Martin, a patent attorney with Drinker Biddle [now McDermott].
President Obama announced on Thursday, January 21 his intention to push for banking reform and new legislation to limit the size of banks to prevent the existence of banks that are “too big to fail,” and to have new regulations instituted that control the type and degree of risks banks can undertake in their investment decisions.
