Paul Goldstein > Quotes

“Patent lawyers had only lately ascended to the aristocracy of the American bar. Trained not just as lawyers but as scientists or engineers, and working in small, specialized firms, they were at one time rudely dismissed by corporate lawyers as gearheads in green eyeshades, not good enough at science to be scientists, nor sufficiently talented at law to be real lawyers. Then came the intellectual property revolution of the 1990s, and these onetime outcasts found themselves ruling the last vibrant corner of the American economy.”
― Paul Goldstein

“When two companies flog their researchers around the clock to come up with a cure for the same disease, it is no accident when they arrive at virtually identical drugs, sometimes within days of each other. Often the margin of difference is so thin that, outside a courtroom, noone can say for sure which team produced the invention first. Alexander Graham Bell's competitor, Elisha Gray, got to the patent office on the same day as Bell, forcing Bell to prove that he invented the telephone first. And, like Bell, whoever reaches the finish line first not only gets the prize they were all competing for-a patent- but, with that patent, the power to stop anyone else, including the runner-up, from producing or selling the invention.”
― Paul Goldstein, A Patent Lie