Forbes: A New Sheriff Aims To Stop Patent Thievery by David Pridham
This post originally appeared in Forbes on September 27, 2018.
Here’s a little quiz: What do virtually all the world’s greatest innovations of the last 150 years — and all the huge job-creating new industries they spawned — have in common?
Simple. They were all launched by American entrepreneurs relying on the protections of the U.S. patent system.
The telegraph, telephone, and electric power industries, the auto and aircraft industries, television, plastics, photocopiers, semiconductors, computers, software, biotech, the $4 trillion Internet e-commerce industry, smartphones, and now AI and autonomous vehicles — all are based on U.S. innovations incentivized and protected by the U.S. patent system.
What is it about our innovation ecosystem that has made America the birthplace of all those amazing innovations and new industries? Is there some kind of “Yankee ingenuity” gene in our hereditary stock that accounts for the global dominance of U.S.-based innovation?