Law and Justice

Archive for March, 2010

There are those who would prefer to invest in things they can touch and feel. Though stocks of a potential nature certainly have value it can sometimes be difficult to believe they will return on an investment. It seems to be easier to believe in things we can see thus the prominence of intellectual property. This is not to say this is a bad idea but instead to highlight the benefits of investing in intellectual property. Here are some of the potential benefits.

When one thinks of intellectual properties it is often divided into two different categories. You have industrial property, which includes patented designs and inventions. Also copyright type productions which include artistic type works and things of a creative nature. It is difficult to put a definite definition on intellectual property. To some it is anything that is of original thought. To others it is any you have created and applied copyright laws to.

If you just finished creating your own original piece of music and it became popular would you want the residual profits from said song? Well that is the idea of investing in intellectual property. You invest in some piece of art or invention that you expect to gain value. Of course a realistic expectation is that the value will increase ever so slightly and gradually but there are exceptions in which value jumps significantly in a short period of time.

So what is the true value of a piece of intellectual property? Well that is up to public demand to decide whether you like it or not. No matter how valuable you may feel a piece of property or art is it is only as valuable as the public deems it to be. Opinions are important so far as they are in common with other opinions.

The question here is intellectual property a good investment. Well, if you are read up and experienced in the arena of whatever physical thing you are betting on then yes it is a good investment. If you have zero experience with this then it is probably wise that you stick with something you know. There is definitely money to be made on intellectual property so long as you know the industry. There is nothing inherently wrong with investing in something you truly believe in so long as it really has value that will increase over time.

Moving to Duluth, GA is an opportunity for employment, contentment, and ideal apartment choices. For those planning a move here, this article provides some background information about the cityÕs demographics and schools, its weather and job market.

Duluth is a city in Gwinnett County, in the Atlanta metro area. The community was named for the city in Minnesota. The latitude of Duluth is 34.002N. The longitude is -84.144W. It is in the Eastern Standard time zone. Elevation is 1,096 feet. The estimated population, in 2003, was 23,697.

Duluth, Georgia, is a fast-growing, white-collar suburb of Atlanta. With a low unemployment rate and nearly half of adults holding bachelor’s degrees, the city is a magnet for professional and white-collar workers, including a significant population of middle-class African-Americans. Metropolitan Atlanta is home to such institutions of higher learning as Emory University, Georgia Tech and Georgia State University.

In a constantly shifting metropolitan environment, Duluth, Georgia, has learned how to adapt to grow with the times, presenting a small town appearance with easy access to big city attractions. Just 25 miles north of Atlanta, as of the 2000 census Duluth had a population of just over 22,000, with almost half its citizens being college graduates. Since then the population has risen to over 25,000.

Duluth prides itself on its respect for its history, opening the doors to its first Duluth History Museum in September 2000. It is also the home of the Gwinnett Civic and Cultural Center, which regularly offers concerts, conventions, pageants and sporting events for visitors from all over the state. For more extensive cultural offerings, including museums, major league sports and live theater, the hotspot of Atlanta is less than half an hour away. And with Georgia’s temperate climate of mild winters and hot summers, the area is perfect for almost any outdoor activity, such as waterskiing, mountain biking and camping in the nearby Blue Ridge Mountains.

Duluth’s well-educated, white-collar residents enjoy a strong economy. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the city has an unemployment rate of only 1.8%, well below the national average. It comes as no surprise, then, that the largest fields of employment for local residents include professional, management and administrative services. Such a high concentration of professional workers doesn’t mean other sectors are unwelcome in the local economy, though: AGCO Corporation, a world leader in agricultural equipment, and Gerdau Ameristeel, a manufacturer of steel, rebar, wire and other construction materials, are just two of the manufacturers that employ many Duluth residents.

Although educational opportunities within Duluth city limits stop at the high school level, advanced education is available across the metropolitan Atlanta area. The region is home to such institutions as Emory University, one of the Southern Ivies and, according to U.S. News and World Report, the 17th-best university in the country. Other institutions of higher learning in the area include Georgia State University in downtown Atlanta and the Georgia Institute of Technology, also in Atlanta.

So there you have it, moving to Duluth is a smart move. If you are looking for an apartment, be sure to use a rental service company. They can help you secure an apartment, as well as learn more about the community.

In a stunning and unexpected 6-3 ruling the right-leaning Supreme Court went against the wishes of the last president, took the wind out of the sails of health care reform of the current president, sent irresponsible Big Pharma a major wake up call, and bluntly told the arrogant FDA that they are indeed not above the rule of law.  It is a major victory for every American citizen.

Central to the issue is a power a struggle between the federal government and states, which in this situation meant the federal government authority to pre-empt your state rights to sue if you are injured by a drug.  The FDA, acting on behalf of the Bush administration and on the side of Big Pharma, has helped tie up thousands of drug injury lawsuits across the country.  The FDA, who is supposed to be protecting consumers from drug injury and ensuring a correct risk/safety picture for any person taking a drug, was instead trying to shirk their responsibility and simply claim that Americans had no right to sue.

This convoluted attempt by the FDA to undermine consumer safety was one of the main themes in my 2006 book, Fight for Your Health: Exposing the FDA’s Betrayal of America.  The Bush Administration had intentionally appointed anti-safety people in high positions within the FDA, starting with its Chief Counsel, Daniel Troy (and continued as a legal philosophy after Troy was forced out for his Big Pharma connections).  Troy set in motion the legal problem the Supreme Court just decided.

During the final years of the Bush administration cancer industry insider Andrew von Eschenbach, MD, was appointed to run the FDA, and Wall Street insider, Scott Gottlieb, MD, was second in command.  These individuals sought to fully implement the FDA label as senior to any rights of citizens.  Their intention was to make sure that new biotech drugs would be protected from lawsuits, as the FDA wanted to speed new and even more dangerous drugs onto the market so as to foster the development of the biotech industry.  In essence, the FDA management wanted to turn the American public into one large clinical experiment, with no right of recourse when injured.

This was occurring against a backdrop wherein the FDA couldn’t even name all the drugs currently on the market, had failed to demand required aftermarket follow up safety testing on drugs, and had intentionally withheld safety information on existing drugs from the public.  The current situation with drugs is that almost no drug, even blockbusters and those in use for decades, have an accurate risk/benefit profile.

Americans who use medications are already taking risks of unknown magnitude, which is a main reason over 100,000 Americans are killed every year and over 3 million are injured so seriously they need hospital care (ironically, over half those injuries occur while already in the hospital).

The FDA knows full well that when a drug is approved for the market the full extent of the side effects won’t be known for years.  History shows us time and again that Big Pharma actively hides risk data from the FDA and pays for “science” that distorts reality.  This irresponsible behavior goes along with closed-door negotiations with the FDA, and has resulted in numerous drug disasters like Vioxx.  FDA managers oftentimes go against the wishes of their own safety scientists and then move on to six figure salaries in the industry they regulate.  Doctors are not apprised of the actual risks and consumers are in the dark. 

Currently, there are 450,000 additional new cases of heart failure every year in Americans over 65, a fact that parallels the increased use of heart-weakening statins in this older group.  It is only a matter of time before the shoe drops on the 20-billion-dollar-a-year statin industry.

The FDA insistence that a drug label, based on what is known at the time of approval, should supersede citizen’s states rights to sue if they were injured, has almost nothing to do with consumer safety.  Rather, it is a federal power grab that is in the best financial interests of Big Pharma and Big Biotech, industries that do not have consumer safety as their top priority.

By the way, don’t think President Obama is on the side of the citizens.  In the health care section of the stimulus bill, there is specific pre-emption language.  If the federal government is in charge of health care it will be named in future lawsuits when patients are injured from the care it doles out or doesn’t allow. 

The current Supreme Court ruling will undermine any system of federal health care wherein the drugs being used are injuring people.  Experts believe this system is so badly broken, due to gross FDA management incompetence, that it will take 10 years of studies and many billions of dollars just to understand the actual risks of the drugs Americans are already taking.

In writing for the majority, Justice John Paul Stevens put Big Pharma on notice.  The defendant in this case, Wyeth, had argued that it could not comply with both federal and state law.  Stevens told them they had a fundamental misunderstanding of regulation and were trying to hide behind the FDA, going on to say that it is a central premise of federal drug regulation that the manufacturer bears responsibility for the content of its label at all times.  That is not the news Big Pharma wanted to hear.

Stevens went on to write that there was no merit in the argument that the FDA’s labeling decisions could supersede state law, saying that this argument was “an untenable interpretation of congressional intent and an overbroad view of an agency’s power to pre-empt state law.” He pointed out that the FDA tried to push this on the public without any opportunity for comment from the public or from states, all done against a backdrop wherein the FDA is not able to keep up with safety issues in the first place, meaning that the FDA position lacked “thoroughness, consistency and persuasiveness.” Stevens stated that under such lacking standards the Bush position “is entitled to no weight.”

This is a major victory for all Americans and for states.  While the case itself is on the topic of Big Pharma and the FDA, the ruling is sweeping in nature and will extend far beyond prescription drugs.  States have just been handed a major legal ruling against the ever-growing incursion of federal power.

If you are an inventor, a writer, a musician or a designer, it doesn’t matter if you live in Murrieta, California, San Diego, CA, Mission Viejo, Carlsbad, La Jolla, Westminster, Orange County, Anaheim, Orange, Irvine, Escondido, San Luis Obispo, Rancho Cucamonga, Ontario, Huntington Beach, Temecula or Palm Springs, Palm Desert, or Indian Wells, CA, the law is the same with regard to intellectual property in California. But why are patents, trademarks and copyrights are considered “Intellectual Property?” A good patent lawyer, trademark attorney, copyright lawyer or intellectual property law firm can tell you.

 

Actually it is the inventions that are patented, the symbols or words that are trademarked and the works of literature, music, film and the like that are copyrighted that are considered to be the intellectual property, but the question is really what makes them either intellectual or property?

 

Some, if not many of the works that are copyrighted are anything but intellectual, but their copyrights are extremely valuable nonetheless.

 

A funny looking symbol that becomes a trademark is perhaps more artistic than intellectual, but that symbol can be worth millions.I

 

nventions are really more inventive than intellectual, but if they work, they can be a benefit to mankind.

 

So, is it right that any of these things should be considered the property of one and not all of us?

 

What gives one person the right to protect a set of words or an invention as their own property?

 

Well, what the law does is reward people for their intellectual efforts. Whether that effort is to paint a beautiful painting, to write a wonderful piece of music or to create a device that makes it easier or more energy-saving to do something, that person deserves to be rewarded. And what the law does is give that composer or inventor a number of years to make a monetary reward from his or her efforts.

 

Some people question why a composer or inventor still has to go to great cost or effort to then market their works before they get any reward. Why aren’t they simply paid for the creation? Why do they still have to become marketing and advertising geniuses? Why must they even pay filing fees or an attorney to have their works and inventions protected.

 

The answer is simply a question. Who would pay these writers and inventors? The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office doesn’t have money to pay these people. Nor does the Library of Congress.

 

The system that is worldwide for protecting the works of our most artistic and intelligent people is not without fault, but it is the best system devised to date, despite the many efforts by pirates and infringers to steal the rewards that should go to these writers and inventors.

 

Patents, trademarks and copyrights can be extremely valuable. The copyright infringement of a book not long ago resulted in a seven figure settlement. Trademark infringement and patent infringement cases routinely result in settlement in the millions. And patents can be licensed or sold outright for tens of millions of dollars and sometimes more.

 

If you would like more information on intellectual property, need defense in a lawsuit, or wish to patent an invention or design, trademark a slogan, symbol or phrase, or copyright a literary work, photograph or a musical composition as an example, we invite you to call us.

 

If you have an intellectual property matter in Orange County, San Diego, in the Inland Empire, Palm Springs or anywhere in Southern California, we have the knowledge and resources to be your San Diego Intellectual Property Lawyers, and Orange County and Anaheim Intellectual Property Attorneys. For this reason, be sure to hire a California law firm with copyright lawyers who are ready to serve you in many areas such as Costa Mesa, Anaheim and Pacific Beach so you are properly represented when you need to be.

 

If you have an intellectual property matter and need to know your rights, call the Law Offices of R. Sebastian Gibson, or visit our website at http://www.SebastianGibsonLaw.com and learn about your rights and options. You can also call us to speak directly to Sebastian Gibson on the phone about your legal matter.