Patents, profits and power: book review.

John McGonagle, The Helicon Group


Patents, Profits & Power: How Intellectual Property Rules the Global Economy. Curtis Cook. 202 pages. Kogan Page, distributed in the US by Styles Publishing, $35.00.

[Editor’s note: John McGonagle reviews key CI books for Competitive Intelligence Magazine. He will be reviewing secondary but useful books in a regular article for SCIP.online.]

Canadian consultant Curtis Cook has followed up on his book Competitive Intelligence – Create an Intelligence Organization and Compete to Win (with Michelle Cook as lead author[1]) with one with a much broader scope. In Patents, Profits & Power, he has taken on the difficult task of educating lay readers about a complex and critical topic: the development of and power of global intellectual property rights.

Curtis has skillfully woven together clear, intelligible discussions of patents, trademarks, trade secrets and the like with well-organized presentations on how the property rights that businesses generate can and are enforced around the world – and where and how they are ignored. And, in a short space, he takes the reader from the theft of trade secrets to the wide-spread abuse of copyright laws in the academic world, making important connections along the way.

Internet rules

The section I found most interesting was Chapter 8, dealing with 'internet rules.' There, Curtis points out how little protection exists for internet 'publications,' but reminds us that the lack of effective protections does not mean that poachers can proceed without risk. The penalties for poachers can be devastating.

For the CI professional, an understanding of the world of intellectual property and its rules (and lack of rules), should be a critical element of CI training programs. Not only does this information expand the CI professional’s understanding of the way businesses are developing new types of wealth, it has several other, more important, benefits:

• It enables the CI professional better to understand what data its competitors are protecting, why and how.
• It provides the CI professional with additional guidance, from the ethical and legal perspectives, on what can and cannot be done.
• It allows the CI professional to better guide a program protecting a company’s competitively sensitive data from the collection efforts of other CI professionals.

For its well-directed handling of all of these issues, I strongly suggest that this book become a staple in all CI training programs.

Background

John J. McGonagle, a SCIP member since 1991, is managing partner of The Helicon Group, a firm specializing in providing consulting, research and training in competitive and strategic analysis since 1980. He received SCIP’s Fellows Award in 1998. John is co-author with Carolyn Vella (Helicon’s founding partner) of seven books on CI, the most recent of which is Bottom Line Competitive Intelligence (2002). John and Carolyn, in their “other life,” breed, show, and judge pedigreed cats in the American Cat Fanciers Association. John can be reached at 1.610.916.2081.

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