Innovation for the 21st Century Symposium

I would like to formally thank Mike Carrier, Geoff Manne, Phil Weiser, Dan Crane, Brett Frischmann, Scott Kieff and Dennis Crouch for participating in the first TOTM symposium on Mike’s book: Innovation for the 21st Century: Harnessing the Power of Intellectual Property and Antitrust Law.   Thanks also to Dennis for cross-posting at PatentlyO.  Each of the participants was asked to in a rather short time period to read the book and prepare a thoughtful and engaging post.  They all delivered marvelously.  We are grateful to them for making the symposium a success and, we hope, enjoyable for our readers.

Most of all, I’d like to thank Professor Carrier allowing his work to come center stage in our first blog symposium effort.  It is not easy to have one’s worked poked and prodded and critiqued from all possible angles.  As flattered as I am by Mike’s kind words about my efforts putting together the symposium and finding discussants, I’m quite sure his job was the tougher one (I didn’t write a book either!).  Besides, each of the discussants jumped at the opportunity and agreed to participate too quickly for it really to qualify as work.  In fact, by their individual and collective performance they’ve unwittingly ensured that I will come asking for more work from them down the road …This was a new experiment for TOTM and one that we plan on continuing to try in the future.  If participants, commenters, or readers have comments or suggestions for possible future topics or for improving the format, I’d love to hear them via email or otherwise.We do have one more exciting announcement about the symposium:The folks at the Alabama Law Review have generously offered to publish modified and versions of the blog posts as essays in a forthcoming volume.  We will make sure to announce here when the final drafts are up and ready.