How One Publisher Got Involved with Law Books for Engineers
Nolo Press, the niche book publisher in Berkeley, Calif., has for 32 years been printing plain-language books that guide readers through various legal thickets without the need for a lawyer. Since the 1984 publication of Patent It Yourself, the company has been publishing information of particular relevance to engineers, programmers, and inventors, expanding into such areas as nondisclosure agreements and Internet domain name disputes.
Following the recent publication of Nolo's latest book, Inventor's Guide to Law, Business & Taxes, IEEE Spectrum associate editor Stephen Cass talked to Richard Stim, head of Nolo's intellectual property section, about the company and some of the lessons it has gleaned through its three decades in publishing.
Richard Stim, head of Nolo Press's intellectual property section. Nolo has been publishing law books for lay people since 1971 and specifically in the arena of intellectual property since 1984.
How did Nolo get involved in publishing books about intellectual property?
The company was founded with the concept of empowering people to do their own legal work, which in the beginning seemed pretty straightforward: divorce, things like that. Then in 1985 David Pressman came to Nolo and published his book, Patent It Yourself. A lot of intellectual property lawyers criticized Nolo at the time, saying, "That's ridiculous, you can't tell anyone how to prepare a patent application themselves." But the book took off, and a lot of people got patents because of it. It's been the top-selling patent book since.
Why was it so successful?
In part because doing it yourself can save you money, but also it may be your only way to get the patent application prepared. A lot of patent lawyers are not that eager to take on independent inventors anymore; it's not really financially worth their while: they prefer corporate clients. But you can, if you apply yourself diligently, prepare your own patent application.
So that's how Nolo's intellectual property publishing kicked off. From there, we put out the Copyright Handbook, which also became a classic, and followed up with books on trademarks, licensing inventions, and filing a provisional patent application, and more recently with books like Web and Software Development, which cover topics such as licensing and copyright for developers.
Only recently have intellectual property issues entered the popular consciousness, but Nolo has been publishing in this area since 1984. Why were you ahead of the curve?
While I think it's true that the general public hasn't paid much attention historically, your readers, for example, have definitely been tuned in. IEEE members were certainly aware of many of these issues 10 years ago when they were involved in the battle over the LZW patent [for the algorithm widely used to compress images on the Internet].
The IEEE published the algorithm and everyone began using it because they assumed it was public domain. The owner of the patent, Unisys, didn't do anything about it for nearly seven years, until 1994, when it started demanding royalties. A lot of programmers considered that move the Pearl Harbor of software engineering because it was a sneak attack.
What trends have you seen in intellectual property since Patent It Yourself was first published?
If you look at the whole picture of intellectual property for the last 200 years, you see the same thing happening over and over again, and it just happened again with the Internet. New media or new technology comes out, the lawmakers don't know what to do for a few years, and then everything settles down. An example is domain names; initially you had this cybersquatting problem to deal with. Then the legal framework caught up and it's just not really that much of an issue anymore.
In terms of patents, there was an explosion of patents for Internet processes, but that died down once the money dried up! Even if you had the money to get one of those patents, remember that a patent is like a hunting license: it's no good unless you go after people who are infringing and you can't go after people unless you have money. The statistics from the U.S. patent office show that Internet business patents have dried up by a third. The same thing happened with the registration of domain names as trademarks—they've also dried up by a third in the last three or four years.
What's Nolo's strategy for keeping up with changes in intellectual property law?
The main thing is that our books get updated a lot—they're almost like annual magazines. If you bought a book and you want to know what's changed since you bought it, you can go to our Web site [http://www.nolo.com], and it'll show you everything that's new. We try to keep things current, and that's not hard to do; we just pay attention to the news. That was a lot harder 10 years ago, before the Internet made a lot of information available online.
Is it difficult translating intellectual property law for engineers?
Everything out there is explainable. The reason that some things are hard to understand is because some lawyer wants to make money as a translator!
But engineers have some advantages. They can usually express their innovations and make clear what's novel and what's not obvious about their idea, and these are the key requirements for getting a patent. It's the other side of it, the filling in of the forms that have to accompany it, the maintenance of the patent, dealing with the examiners—those are steps that may be troublesome for some engineers.
Another thing is that the legislation isn't always going to give you everything that you need to know because every law gets interpreted by the court. We try to be practical in the Nolo books by saying there's the law, and this is how the law is interpreted. For example, I may be able to tell you that if you print the things I'm saying, you're O.K. under the law—that is, you'll win a case in court about it—but that doesn't mean you can't still be sued!
So that second factor—is there enough of a gray area that you can be sued?—is often more important to people than the law, because they would rather not be sued. I would say it's a little bit like the weather: we can give you some degree of certainty what will happen, but we can't guarantee it.
What general things should engineers keep in mind when thinking about the law?
No. 1, you should be mostly concerned about running your business day to day. There's much more of a chance that you'll get into trouble with the IRS [Internal Revenue Service] than that someone is going to steal your intellectual property. So I'd recommend that you read a book like our Inventor's Guide to Law, Business & Taxes.
Theft is possible, but it's not as likely to happen as people think. It's easier for a business to get something it wants from you legitimately by ripping you off with a crummy royalty rate rather than stealing it outright. But you do want to know what your rights are, and so the books I've mentioned will tell you your general rights.
The problem is that most people aren't proactive. They wait for something terrible to happen and then they ask, "What can I do?" I know as a lawyer that I sometimes look at agreements people have signed and go, "Well, you signed this, and you signed away that, so I can't really help you there."
It's also important to have an accurate idea of the real worth of your intellectual property. Most people have a very unrealistic idea of how much an invention can earn. Many inventions have a short shelf life or only have value in relation to another invention. A reasonable royalty and a small advance are much more normal than a large advance.
You shouldn't be thinking in terms of hitting the jackpot with a single invention. Most famous or wealthy inventors have lots of patents for different things. You should always be thinking, "What's my next invention?" Only 3 percent of patents are ever commercialized, often because people are more obsessed with protecting themselves than with thinking whether they're going to sell it.
Finally, for your readers, there's more to life than electrical engineering; there's marriage and divorce and wills and buying houses, and we have plenty of books to help save them money there, too!