Lots of great blow-by-blow analysis out there regarding Monday’s long-awaited U.S. Supreme Court decision on the extent to which software and business methods qualify for patent protection.
Here it is as a haiku.
Nine, robed black, have kept
The path to patents lit, for
Software and methods.
Be at peace.
Dear JetBlue,
At the Ritz-Carlton in Half Moon Bay, just over the San Bruno hills from the Silicon Valley, they have a guy come out and play “Amazing Grace” on the bagpipes every night for the guests who are watching the sun set over the Pacific. It is a moment that is unexpected and unforgettable. As a branding moment for the hotel, it is like a the free chocolates on your pillow times a million.
You can create poignant branding moments like that. Sometimes, however, circumstances thrust branding moments upon you involuntarily. Your survival as a company is contingent on your response to such moments.
My JetBlue flight last night (Thursday 24 June 2010) from JFK to Tampa, originally scheduled to depart at ~7:30pm, did not depart until ~12:30am this morning.
I could go through the details, but suffice it to say the experience was typical. JetBlue, do you want to be typical?
We were eventually told the delay was due to the crew’s having been delayed due to weather. Given the exigencies of summer travel on the eastern seaboard, one would think that an airline attempting to excel above its rank & file competitors would consider having a spare crew or two at the ready, especially at its JFK hub, to forestall customer dissatisfaction and frustration in situations like this.
I have been a fan, and rather loyal customer, since 2000. You have always distinguished yourself as slightly more hip, cool, and fun than your aging competitors, slightly more in touch with the customer as a person. Slightly atypical, in fact.
But last night, you were just another typical old airline herding the geese.
What a branding moment you could have created. It was a moment that mattered more than other moments. You could have made it a positive experience, one that converted a few tired, victimized passengers into evangelists for your airline.
Would it have been so hard to offer cold water bottles or hot towels or blue chips or some other unexpected treat to your passengers in the throes of an unexpected 5-hour delay? (To be fair, the crew did make all the PPV movies free of charge once we finally took flight, but really, who wanted to watch a movie from 1 to 3am?)
Look, flying is a necessary evil. We don’t want to be your customer; we just want to get home. You can’t really do much in the bagpipes-at-sunset department to change that aspect of our relationship with you. We are just pleased when your customer service doesn’t suck as bad as the typical airlines.
But at any time when we’re feeling underserved and that is even partially your fault — and even when it’s not — you might want to find a nice, simple way to say you care. When a flight delay occurs, your customer service performance gets herniated into every customer’s face. It is the only thing we care about for the duration of the delay. We are primed to remember everything you do at a moment like this.
Do more than just not suck. Do something atypical and unexpected. We won’t forget.
Remarks delivered to open the Internet Technology Summit, Orlando, 22 June 2010.
It is human nature to root for the underdog. Make no mistake, we loves us some winners, but we adores us some winners when they come from behind.
May 26, 2010, was a momentous day for come-from-behind winners.
For example, on the Fox network, a mildly Springsteen-esque young everyman named Lee DeWyze beat out the barefoot, coffee-house dulcetry of the favored contestant Crystal Bowersox to win the final on this season’s American Idol.
At Tropicana Field in St. Pete that day, the much maligned Boston Red Sox beat the team with the best record in baseball, the Tampa Bay Rays, a whopping 11-3.
And, on the afternoon of May 26, 2010, a remarkable thing happened in the come-from-behind department. Another entity came from behind to win another contest of sorts.
Apple (a/k/a Apple, Inc., f/k/a Apple Computer, Inc.) achieved an overall market capitalization – an overall value – of 241 and a half billion dollars, exceeding, for the first time ever, the market cap of Microsoft, to become the largest technology company in the world.
And there was much rejoicing.
Yes, let the bells clang and let the banners fly. Fill the steins to dear old Apple, shout ‘til the rafters ring.
We celebrate because Apple’s surpassing Microsoft isn’t just a ratification of all that is held dear by artsy fartsy techno geeks.
No. Apple’s ascention in the capital markets, Apple’s assumption to the coveted top spot, Apple’s winning over Microsoft means something far more deep about the state of humanity, and you should care about this because it affects your job.
What it means is this:
The average person no longer cares about software. The man in the street doesn’t give a dingo’s kidney about your latest hack and is unimpressed by the obvious wit and wisdom required to pull it off.
The average person, the man in the street, we… we just wants to buy us some cheap music.
Just over a decade ago, Apple wasn’t quite dead, but it was coughing up blood, receiving last rites, and laying on a hospital bed murmuring “so cold… so cold… I’m coming Commodore… See you soon, Atari… Tandy, I’m coming into the light…”
But then, Apple did not die.
What happened was, the iTunes Music Store was launched in 2003.
On February 23, 2006, the iTunes Music Store sold its 1 billionth song.
Earlier this year, a scant 4 years later, the iTunes music store sold its 10 billionth song.
An order of magnitude growth. At that rate, by oh say 2020, Apple will have sold an infinite number of songs and its market capitalization won’t fit in the known universe.
Oh and let us not forget that Apple has given us one more thing that we also want.
The average person, the man in the street, you and me… we… we wants us some iPhones.
Apple’s win is not just a vote against Microsoft – not just a rejection of software that is bloated, slow, ugly, feature laden, slow, buggy, insecure, intimidating, humiliating, slow, frustrating, and I swear to god sometimes just literally seems to have been designed by asinine, sadistic jerks who just want my day to be worse than it would otherwise have been had I not logged in the first place.
Apple’s win is not just a vote against that. Apple’s win is a vote against the entire consumer-grade software market.
We don’t want to buy software anymore. We don’t want to care about software anymore. We don’t want to know that software even exists.
We don’t buy engines. We buy cars. Fully formed, and ready to roll.
Apple’s win proves that, instead of buying or even worrying about software, as such, we would rather buy and use products like the iPhone.
We want to buy products so stunningly beautiful they seem like they have magically fallen to earth from the future and into our loving hands, an object whose user interface is sheer visual poetry, a product you don’t so much use, as dance ballet with.
The iPhone is modern proof of Arthur C. Clark’s notion that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
The iPhone is a product that does not insult you, like practically everything the tech market had heretofore produced. The iphone is a product that actually delivers on what advertisers and marketers of everything from beer to deodorant have been promising us for decades – using an iPhone actually makes you sexier.
And so that’s it, right? Apple has beaten Microsoft? The war is won? We’re no longer insulted and humiliated, now we’re all unbearably sexy?
In the future, do you officially come from behind and win if you can sell us a little slice of sexy magic to carry in our pocket?
We live in a strange universe. Current observations suggest that our 3-dimensional existence is fully describable as a hologram off a 2-dimensional surface. Quite literally, we seem to live in an astral projection.
Current observations suggest that time itself does not really exist as a fundamental component of reality, but is just an emergent property that arises out of a particular condition of a static, timeless, quantum undergirding.
And for decades we have known beyond any realistic shadow of doubt that reality itself doesn’t actually exist until we observe it. It is a proven scientific fact that the very fabric of the universe creates itself for us to look at.
All of reality is a smudge, a smear of quantum probability, pregnant with nothing but possibility, until someone observes it and by doing so, collapses the quantum state vector, whereupon reality promptly and conveniently condenses into existence for us to share and enjoy. When we look away, however, the universe turns back into smoke.
Apparently the universe itself is indistinguishable from magic.
This is true. Google it.
Funny thing… If you know anything about memory management inside the kernel of any computer operating system you’ll recognize how much the quantum world seems to kinda sorta be paging into a virtual swap file.
Reality seems to present itself to us in more or less exactly the same way that computing resources are allocated to processes inside computers.
Computing is different to other technological advances humans have enjoyed. Indoor plumbing rocks, to be sure; the steam engine? A superb addition to the repertoire.
But computing is different. Computing is the gift that keeps on giving. With computing, you can create that which is virtual, that which can simulate reality.
With numbah 6, you get virtual egg roll.
We have had virtual memory, virtual machines, virtual operating systems since roughly the Lyndon Johnson administration. For the past few years we’ve toyed with virtual reality. Tens of thousands of people a day login to virtual worlds.
In the not too distant future, possibly in my lifetime, but surely within the lifespan of my kids and of anyone born in this millenium, the computing power of the average handheld computer will exceed that of the human brain. It will be capable of thought, if we can figure out how to program it properly.
All that you perceive yourself to be is composed of a highly organized matrix of electrochemical potentials running on a supremely portable, 100-watt massively parallel computing device made of about 5 pounds of meat situated right behind your face… and if we could precisely duplicate the state of your brain in another computing device, when we powered that device up, it would swear it was you.
In a few years, devices with that power will be commonplace. Hopefully we’ll figure out how to program them carefully. Hopefully using such devices will be less like Outlook hell, and more like iPhone heaven, so that as I am downloading my consciousness into it, my consciousness will be transmitted free of angst, frustration, grit, and scale.
So how far away are we from a world in which fully conscious, fully sentient, effectively human simulacra are running around in your laptop? Moore’s law dictates it won’t be that long – just a few years now – before the Sims will be taking matters into their own hands.
And if we can simulate virtual humans, how long will it be before they, our virtual children, hit upon the divine spark to uncover the means to invent their own virtual computers, compose their own virtual software, create their own virtual worlds, and breathe life into their own conscious, sentient, virtual beings?
And if we can invent simulacra, and our simulacra can invent simulacra, and so on and so on ad infinitum, then what on god’s green earth presupposes that we are at the top of this inventive chain?
I remind you again of how much the fact that reality springs into being as we observe it, bears an unmistakable similarity to virtual memory management inside a computer.
OMFG. There is an MFG, and she’s a hacker.
Quod erat demonstratum.
I firmly believe the universe is teaming with life and that some of it is bound to be intelligent and that as soon as we can figure out how to span the enormous distances between us, we’ll go out and meet them someday and when we do we won’t give a damn about the extent of their technological advancement. Interstellar space travel is a hard problem. If we can engineer ourselves into a truly spacefaring race, we will by necessity have solved pretty much any technological problem a species could ever encounter and so we won’t be terribly impressed with any particular tech our extraplanetary brethren might show us. Nor they, ours.
What we will hunger for, what we will judge each other by, is by our culture. We will care about their music and their poetry and their appreciation for the mysteries of existence, and we will care about how they govern themselves and whether or not they attend gracefully to the weak and infirm among themselves.
We will care a great deal about whether they are evil, or peaceful. Their capacity for pleasure. What kinds of beer they prefer. That sort of thing.
And if there is a master programmer above us in the chain (and let’s not forget the possibility, nay the inevitability that he, she, or it, too is just a virtual precipitation of bits running around in some even higher being’s computing device), if there is something or someone above, isn’t it likely that he, she, or it is judging us on the same criteria?
My point is this:
It matters how much beauty you create in the world. Because it sticks. Your actions have consequences. Your products, your services, your companies, your customer service techniques, these things literally raise or lower the aggregate level of happiness in the world with every act and omission.
And it will be remembered.
The code you write today may still be running in 20 or 30 years. How much happiness will it have created? How much frustration?
I beseech you: engineer beauty. Peddle pleasure. Sell happiness. We agree on happiness. We all want happiness.
We don’t agree on much more.
According to a recent Harris poll, 24 percent of republicans think that Barack Obama might be the antichrist and 22 percent of republicans think Barack Obama wants the terrorists to win.
What’s disappointing about this – well among the symphony of things that are disappointing about this – is that only the remaining 2% of those polled have demonstrated the intellectual thoughtfulness to recognize think that if Obama is the antichrist he probably wants everyone to lose, even the terrorists.
‘Cuz that’s how the antichrist rolls, man.
So we don’t agree on who’s good and who’s evil. And we don’t agree on certain other important things.
Here’s a passage from a children’s book called “Ni Hao Kai Lan” which is intended to introduce American children to Chinese culture:
“When you make something and people copy you, sometimes it means that they really like it too! And that makes it even more special!”
So, it is one thing to embrace the open source movement, to promote sharing, and to choose to release your innovative output under the creative commons license. It is quite another to have communist china inculcating, dare I say, indoctrinating, your children into a way of thinking that abdicates the very basis of all intellectual property ownership rights.
So we as a species do not agree on what is right and good. We’re still not planetary. We’re still nationalized based on where we live. We still have yet to divorce jurisdiction from geography. The laws that apply to your behavior change every time you travel to a different hunk of rock. God only knows what laws apply in the non-space… the pan-space…. that is the internet.
The good news is that, as of yesterday, the Yuan will be allowed to float against the dollar, so in theory the Chinese will be able to buy more of our stuff. Oh wait, the Chinese make all our stuff. Hmm… quick make some stuff to sell to the Chinese!
We are all connected like we’ve never been before. For all intents and purposes, nearly everyone on the planet has a cell phone, give or take a billion. As Clay Shirky put it, here comes everyone.
So how do you sell to that? How do you create a product today that will win over a massively interconnected world of consumers who don’t agree on the difference between good and evil, don’t agree on the basic rules of how to govern themselves? How do you create a product that will speak well of you to your virtual children decades hence, a product that will acquit you as you someday stand before the aliens or the master programmer or whomever else comes along to pass judgment?
My advice: take a page from Apple’s book. If you can do nothing else, for the love of MFG, make stuff that makes people sexier.
Current history demonstrates that that’s a winning strategy.
Thank you.
You are living every entrepreneur’s dream. After years of sleepless nights sweating for equity, you are preparing to cash out. Your startup company has become an acquisition target. After several rounds of negotiations, a strategic partner offers to buy your company for a whopping $100 million. You’ll finally get a good night’s sleep.
You are understandably proud of yourself, and with good reason. As CEO, you’ve run a tight ship. You’ve used outside contractors instead of full time employees whenever possible. And you’ve managed to keep costs at a bare minimum. When your lawyers offered to draft you up a bunch of agreements to govern those outside contractor relationships, for example, you told them to hit the road – you would do just fine with a handshake deal, thank you very much. None of that pay-by-the-pound legal mumbo jumbo for you.
To finalize the acquisition deal, you’ll have to endure something called “due diligence,” which is when the buyer’s lawyers get to look closely at your company – closely enough to satisfy themselves that their client is not buying a headache. One of the many things they will want to review is your intellectual property (IP) portfolio.
It is at this point where your dream threatens to become a nightmare.
Late one night, the buyer’s CEO calls to break the bad news to you. Her lawyers have concluded that, because you did not execute something called assignment agreements and work-for-hire agreements with your outside contractors, your company does not own the work product they created. The contractors do. If you don’t own the underlying work product, you don’t own the IP in that work product. And it was the prospect of market exclusivity afforded by your IP that moved the buyer to set a $100 million purchase price on your company in the first place.
You cannot sell what you do not own. No IP, no sale.
“The heck you say,” you say. “I paid good money for that work product, and I paid to file the patents and register the copyrights!”
The buyer says she’s sorry but she trusts her lawyers, who say your patents and copyrights are not so hot because you do not really own them. She says she does not wish to fund the defense of the lawsuits that will inevitably arise when your independent contractors realize how rich you have gotten by selling what rightfully belongs to them. Furthermore, she figures that this whole independent contractor thing is probably just the tip of a messy iceberg – in short, a big fat headache — so it’s just best for her to pass. No deal. Have a nice day.
Sometimes the nightmare is not independent contractors. Sometimes it’s a forgotten founder, a person who was once a part of the team making the initial inventive leaps that led to the company’s core innovations, but then left the company in its youth without signing the proper documents. Sometimes it’s a nondisclosure agreement that terminates too early, or a patent application that is filed too late. Sometimes it’s a neglected trademark search. Sometimes is just plain bad paperwork. The nightmares are legion.
Insufficient attention to sound IP practices and controls can, especially in the purposefully ungenerous view of someone else’s lawyers, gut your IP portfolio, deflate your company’s valuation, and leave you with nothing.
Don’t panic. Your entrepreneurial dream does not have to become a nightmare. There’s still time to fix these problems. How? The best way to begin is with an IP audit.
The goal of an IP audit is to verify that the answer to these questions is “yes”:
1. Do you own your IP? In the parlance of lawyers, do you have clean title to your IP assets and do you own them free of liens and encumbrances?
2. Is your IP portfolio complete? Are you protecting everything that is capable of being protected?
3. Is your IP strong and enforceable? If you sue someone for infringing it, will you win?
A complete IP audit identifies the IP assets in your company for which the answer to any of the above questions is “no,” and recommends remedial steps for changing the “no” to a “yes,” as well as the appropriate processes and procedures (and contracts) for ensuring that the answers will henceforth always be “yes.”
Correcting IP title defects requires getting the proper ownership agreements signed between the company and the people who created the IP assets, especially if those creators were not full time employees at the time they did the work. Mind you, this is always legally more powerful before the assets are created (which is what the new processes and procedures are meant to enforce in the future), but an after-the-fact agreement still works. But make no mistake, you’ll be going back to a former worker on bended knee asking for a new agreement to be signed months or years after the work was originally done. This can be awkward at best and expensive at worst, as the worker is more than likely to detect the sweet smell of money in the air and attempt to part you from some of it in exchange for the signature you request.
Correcting completeness defects is simply a matter of filing for whatever patents, copyrights, and trademarks are missing in the portfolio, and instituting internal procedures for identifying and assessing new innovations on a constant basis so that new IP doesn’t slip through the corporate cracks in the future.
Finally, correcting strength & enforceability defects requires a measure of strategic attention to ensure the company’s innovations are being protected in the strongest possible ways in light of the competitive landscape in which they exist. For some innovations, a slew of patents will be the answer; other innovations will best be kept confidential in reliance on trade secret law; for yet others, a mix of patents and trade secrets, as well as copyrights and trademarks, will provide the most bang for your buck.
IP law is esoteric, arcane, and often counterintuitive. Normal business assumptions about ownership do not always apply, and can prove to be quite risky. Aggressive, thoughtful, expert management of your IP portfolio is a sound, rational business practice.
The expense of an IP audit is always directly proportional to the number of documents requiring review. If the IP portfolio is large, so too will the legal bill undoubtedly be. Nonetheless, maintaining a strong IP portfolio is an essential strategy in today’s knowledge economy. Thus, an IP audit is almost always worth the money, if only so you can sleep at night.
I’ve been asked to speak on social media marketing more often than any other subject lately, so I though it would be timely to blog (with permission) this excerpt from Bernie Borges’s awesome book, Marketing 2.0, available at Amazon.
See if you can tell which of my own rules I almost but not quite constantly fail to honor.
Case Study: Personal Branding with Attorney 2.0, Brent Britton
I have witnessed firsthand the Marketing 2.0 style of a hip attorney named Brent Britton. I asked him to summarize his marketing strategy for this book. When I received his email, I decided to publish it unedited to give you insight into his personality and marketing style. Clearly, Mr. Britton understands the power of personal branding. Do a Google search for his
name, and you’ll find several links to him on the social web. Below is Brent Britton’s firsthand account of his Marketing 2.0 strategy, which is summarized by building and fostering relationships both online and offline:
“I am a lawyer running a very busy technology law practice. I use the Internet to connect with my current and future clients and instill in them the necessary confidence that I am the right lawyer for all of their legal needs. I do this with my Web bio, emails, and direct messages of various types, as I have done continuously since I first began using the Internet in the early 1980s.
“More recently, however, I have been able to imbue my business development efforts with unprecedented breadth and scope using some of the new social networking tools, including my pages on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, and with my blog and my podcast.
“Few business people hire lawyers they do not know personally. Clients almost always hire a lawyer based on some history of personal contact; hence the adage, ‘Clients hire lawyers, not law firms.’ In most cases, a law firm’s brand is largely meaningless. Unless the dudes the firm is named after are hanging out in the lobby serving cocoa, they are absolutely irrelevant to my clients. *My* brand is far more important. And my brand is the aggregation of every interaction I have with my current and future clients.
“In this business, networking rocks the house; successful lawyers have always been great social networkers. The new tools available on the Internet today just make that process much easier and efficient, for those who are willing to adapt their client development strategies accordingly. Those who are unwilling to adapt will, as in nature, undergo attenuation in their capacity for survival. If you’re not on the net, you have no brand. You do not exist.
“In the past, to build my brand equity, I had to meet new clients face to face and impress them in that context, often on the spot. Turns out I’m pretty good at that, but no one gets a slam dunk every time. Perhaps they would hear me speak at a conference or read a magazine article I wrote, but there was little else they could do to learn about me or get inside my head short of meeting me and spending time with me in person. And my bandwidth for that has been and always will be, regrettably, quite limited.
“Social networking tools have increased my networking bandwidth substantially. The power of these technologies is in how they increase the power and reach of my brand. My future clients can now time-shift how they learn about me and discover how I think in a manner that is completely untethered from scheduling conflicts.
“Here’s what I do when I am communicating with current and potential clients:
1. I assume everyone is a potential client if they aren’t a current one. Every caller, every emailer, every reader of every tweet.
2. I always answer emails and phone calls on the same day or the next.
3. I always answer text messages as soon as I see them.
4. I write/post/communicate with as high a level of authenticity as I can possibly muster. Nothing, absolutely nothing, will ruin you and your reputation on the net faster than dishonesty. And the truth always comes out. Everything is on the record and the record will be preserved and studied. On the net, dishonesty is a big fat CFIT [acronym for the oddly euphamistic aeronautical term, 'Controlled Flight Into Terrain'].
5. I tweet once or twice daily, on average. I try to keep my Twitter presence relatively constant, though I do experience highs and lows. I try to mix my tweets about 50/50 about the law versus about other things, even just silly puns. LinkedIn is my resume; Twitter is my personality.
6. I auto-direct my tweets to update my Facebook status. Lots of people read me on FB who do not use Twitter.
7. I join LinkedIn groups and participate in the conversations, especially answering substantive legal questions.
8. I try to blog every Monday morning, usually about entrepreneurship. If I do not have time to compose something thoughtful, interesting, or at least entertaining, I do not try to phone it in. The minute your blog gets boring, no one comes back. It’s got to be great every time.
9. I accept nearly every FB friend request and I follow back nearly every Twitter follower.
10. I honor requests from other sites like Plaxo, but I do not actively participate in these communities.
11. I am fortunate to co-host a radio show, The CEO Lounge, that gets posted as a podcast on iTunes. I am also working on others.”
Didja see that one about blogging every week? Ahem.
A hot topic at the bar nowadays is whether lawyers should use the cloud to run their practice. The North Carolina bar is planning a formal ethics opinion on the subject. What do you think?
The law can be strange and counterintuitive, and people can hold remarkably – sometimes catastrophically – wrong ideas about it. Here are some:
Myth: Mailing yourself a copy of your work means no one can steal your idea. Sorry. A postmark suggests a tiny bit of proof of genesis, but doesn’t create an exclusionary right of ownership.
Myth: Citation cures infringement. Nope. Citation cures plagiarism. Infringement is infringement whether you credit the victim or not.
Myth: Environmental or endangered species cases are always really about the environment or endangered species. Sometimes the endangered species is a good excuse to control a NIMBY.
Myth: You cannot get pulled over for doing 5 mph over the speed limit. I admit it’s rare. But the law likes bright lines. Cross them at your peril.
Myth: Copying music is always a copyright infringement. Sometimes it’s a fair use.
Myth: Getting a patent helps you own your ideas. Getting a patent helps you own a patent. Ideas can’t be owned.
Myth: If you have a good idea, all you need to do is patent it to make money. If you want to make money from your good idea, start a company to commercialize it.
Myth: You can pay people under the table without too much trouble. Even if you’re never planning to run for office, you should pay all of your employees according to federal and state employment and tax law requirements, even once-per-week domestic help like maids and babysitters.
Myth: Unpaid interns and low level employees don’t need an employment contract. Always a good idea to get a quick contract in place that incorporates the handbook, describes the job and the pay, and solidifies IP ownership.
Myth: You can’t be sued if you haven’t done anything wrong. Ha! I could you sue you this afternoon. In fact, I might.
Myth: If you bought and paid for it, you own it. Not if it’s a copyrightable work authored by an independent contractor, you don’t, not without getting the right contract signed beforehand.
I presented ideas2happy at TedxTampaBay a couple of weeks ago. My thesis is that obsessive focus on shareholder wealth maximization leads to evil, but that obsessive focus on customer and employee happiness leads to shareholder wealth maximization.
Video here.
Slides here.
I hold up the philosophies of Google (“don’t be evil”) and Zappos (“delivering happiness”) as examples.
Ever paused to reflect on the odd nature of jurisdiction? The rules that govern your behavior change as you move to different sections of the earth’s crust. Don’t like the rules here? Go stand on another rock.
Land-centric provincialism seems increasingly archaic in the age of the internet, a truly global village where the rock you’re standing on is neither obvious nor relevant to your participation. But I’d wager it’s not going away on anything less than a truly tectonic timescale, however.
Turns out, as discussed in this discovery.com article, if you actually lose your hunk of rock (say, beneath the waves of an ever-encroaching sea of glacial melt water), then you risk losing your right to be a country. No land, no sovereignty. When your territorial waters overtake your territory, you go from being a king to a serf.
Or, um, a surf.
My advice to the soon-to-be modern-day Atlantisians? Get yourself a Noah. Or perhaps a NOAA.
Or, build yourself a tall platform and move up in the world.
The (rather spartan) slides from my recent talk, TOp Ten Legal Issues for Startups, are here: http://www.slideshare.net/bcjb/top-ten-legal-issues-for-startups
Video coming soon.
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