NECESSITY'S CHILD

In Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel, the author offers reasons as to why technological innovation flourished in some societies and not others. One key contributor to this is whether a system is in place to incentivize invention by granting exclusive rights to profit from their creations. In other words, patent protection. This is where Jenny came in as she launched her career as a patent attorney back in the late 1990s. Scattered throughout this blog are details of Jenny's time as a law student at UCLA and as an intellectual property (IP) attorney at Siemens and Varian. What I haven't yet covered are the earliest days in her career as a patent attorney. Let's get into it!

Jenny in August 1995, just before beginning her second year of law school

During law school, in 1996, Jenny pursued a summer internship with Knobbe, Martens, Olson and Bear, an Orange County law firm focused on IP protection. It would be where Jenny would launch a career as a patent attorney. Knobbe was also Jenny's first employer after she graduated from law school. Jenny provided a one-stop shop for everything related to patents. This included patent prosecution, an umbrella term covering the entire process of pursuing and securing a patent. This meant extensive discussions with the inventor, assuring all drawings are accurate, filing the application, dealing with the inevitable objections from the US Patent and Trademark Office and so on. Jenny also had the capacity to execute patent maintenance and, if needed, patent litigation.

As an engineer encouraged by my employer to file invention disclosures, I found it helpful to remember a basic rule that Jenny would remind of for decades: A patent is a blocking right that excludes others from making, using or selling the invention. In that respect, it is a "negative right". It does not give the patent owner the right to make, use or sell. For example, there could be an entire litany of regulatory hurdles before, say, a drug can be sold. A patent would only prevent another supplier from making, using or selling that drug.

My favorite patent-related memory from those early days? Before we got engaged, Jenny was working on a patent on a machine that used spherical coordinates. Though she was well versed in Cartesian coordinates (think of these as the x-y coordinates you used in high school), spherical coordinates were definitely a part of her training as a mechanical engineer, but not heavily used. Both sets of coordinates can be used to identify a point in space. However, for systems involving a sphere, such as Earth, spherical coordinates can be especially efficient. Well, to help drive home the concept, I just happened to have a book called, The Stars, by H.A. Rey. In it, the author gives an introduction to the night sky. He talks about constellations and how stars appear to rotate around us. Jenny would go on to list the book in the "References Cited" section of the patent she drafted.

By the way, if the name "H.A. Rey" sounds familiar, he is the co-creator, along with his wife, of Curious George! Yes, an author that Jenny formally referenced in a patent that she drafted is also the co-creator of the world's favorite cartoon monkey.

The very pages Jenny referenced in The Stars by H.A. Rey to help her understand spherical coordinates