Andrei Mincov
speaker
73 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard Sep 2024
Andrei Mincov’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Yeah. Coca-Cola is literally one of my favorite examples. I will remember it by already waking me up in the middle of the night, I'll tell you. They trademarked their brand back in 1892, which is incidentally the year when they just set up a company and when they were selling nine drinks a day.
I call it a lemonade stand with a dream because all they had is this idea that, hey, if we are going to spend any time, money, and effort trying to build those into... a brand, a national brand, we might as well own it. And trademarks is the only type of intellectual property that you can own forever in theory. Copyrights expire, patents expire, design patents, everything expires.
Trademarks, you can renew and renew and renew. So they've been renewing that same trademarks since 1892. And I can bet that there was a lot of people back there who looked at them and said, why are you – bothering spending money on lawyers to trademark this stuff. It's just a drink.
Now this brand is worth $80 billion, just the brand itself, not their factories, not their trucks, not their bottles, not their recipe, just the brand itself. And whatever they paid their lawyers back in 1892, it's probably the best return on investment they've had ever. Right. Yeah, for sure.
The more recent one, which really highlights the value of getting it done right and early, there's this startup called Bird, the electric scooters. You see them everywhere. They were, back in 2021, recognized as the fastest company to grow to a billion-dollar valuation. They knew a thing or two about building a successful business.
So what they did is they started the company and 13 days later, after they started the company, they filed their trademark. Before they launched, before they had their first scooter made, before they, like, I don't know if they had an office back in the day or not, 13 days. Again, because they asked themselves a question, will the brand be important to us if we are to become successful?
And the answer to that was, of course, because if anyone can put a scooter and put the same brand on it, we can't have a viable business model because people are going to be confused and they can't operate like this. And so they said, yeah, brand is going to be important. We want to build it into something that will become big. And so they went and trademarked it.
And now it's part of the billion dollar valuation.
Yeah, I was born in Russia. You can probably hear it from my accent. You know, I try to not use it too much. But I was born there and I went to my first law school there. And I really didn't see myself as a lawyer. But one day, my dad was a famous composer there, Mark Minkov. He saw on the radio, and it wasn't just played as a song. It was played to advertise an event by Samsung.
Nobody ever asked him if he was okay with that. Nobody ever asked him if he'd like to be paid for that. And so he called the radio station. And said, you guys can take my music and use it as you please. And they told him that they were making him even more famous and that he should just sit down and shut up.
And, you know, if you knew my dad, you'd know very quickly that this was the wrong way for them to handle it. And so he said, OK, great. I'll see you in court. And that was 1996. When Russia has just transitioned from the Soviet laws toward more or less free market laws around IP. And so there weren't really a lot of lawyers who knew how this worked. There were no case, so there's nothing.
And so he said, he came to me and said, can you take this case seriously? and go against the radio station. Like you're supposed to know law. And I used to sing this song with them on like hundreds of concerts when I was a kid growing up, right? So it was personal. And I saw what it was doing to him because he was pissed. And I knew nothing about copyright.
I knew nothing about what you do in the courtroom. But I said, sure, let's figure it out. And so I took them to court. First hearing, you know, I'm there with my long hair and a ponytail. And there's this other lawyer. And I ripped them apart. But they somehow got the postponement. Next time, they had four lawyers on the other side. The judge made the decision that was not in our favor.
I was sitting in my room reading that decision that made zero sense. And my dad came into the room and said, well, what are you going to do now? I did all the right things. I said all the right words. And I don't know what to do. So, well, if you're not going to appeal this decision, you should quit your law school and find yourself a different profession. And so I appealed it. We lost the appeal.
At that point, I figured out what to do later. So we appealed it even higher, basically as high as it gets to the second highest court in the nation. And we won. And in the process, I got really, really passionate about helping people who created something that only exists because they created it to help them protect what's theirs and ensure that that doesn't get stolen from them.
So my dad was my first and favorite client, as I like to put it. Then I had a big career in Russia as copyright lawyer with the biggest international law firm in the world, you know, doing work for JK Rowling, Apple, Microsoft, DreamWorks. If you can think of a big business, I've probably done something for them.
And then in 07, I realized that I had enough of Russia and I moved to Canada just to start everything from scratch. IP has a lot more similarities than many other areas of law because so much of it is done in accordance with international treaties that allow IP owners to protect their stuff in different countries. And so when I went back to the Canadian law school, I said to myself, you know what?
This is a good opportunity for you to try other areas of law and see if you like them. Maybe you fell in love with IP just because of your dad. Maybe there's something else. The only other area of law that I enjoyed, you're going to love it, was insurance law. Oh, wow. Because it was so technical and so logical and really was less about emotion, but more about how can we do what's right.
But I never went into insurance law. I kept with IEP because I realized that it's the one thing that I'm really passionate about. And so- finished my Canadian law school top of my class, got exactly zero offers from Canadian law schools.
It felt a little bit like, you remember Rambo 1 when he's at the store and he says, back in Vietnam, they trusted me with million dollar equipment and here I can't find a job parking cars. That's pretty much how I felt with my years of experience, my PhD in law, my top of the class thing. And nobody would trust me to review a $500 contract.
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