Andrew Cooper
speaker
89 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Oct 2024
last heard Oct 2024
Andrew Cooper’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
i had no idea no concept of what intellectual property was or even the practice of law until i was in high school and my uh my father brought home a movie called separate but equal and i became exposed to the law and what lawyers can do and that began kind of my curiosity to the practice of law i ultimately went to college in washington dc and grad school in atlanta georgia at emory
While at Emory, I did a few internships, one with the Coca-Cola company, and that's really what started me down the path of IP, really exposed me to the concept speed of innovation. And for companies like Coca-Cola, innovation is key to them staying at the head of their industry. And it should be something that small business owners think about as well.
After leaving Coca-Cola, I went to practice law at Shook, Hardy & Bacon in the patent litigation group. Moved from there to UPS. I was the vice president of UPS, the chief IP counsel there, and worked for UPS Airlines. So my UPS history was about seven years. And then I transitioned from UPS to Meta Platforms, which is where I am now. And I am the head of patent acquisitions.
I also do technology transactions, open source, and AI work for Meta and Mark Zuckerberg.
Yes, Walterboro, South Carolina.
Oh yeah. So I didn't even touch on Okinawa, but yes, when I was nine years old, around nine years old, my dad was stationed in Okinawa, Japan, U.S. Marine Corps. And so we moved to Okinawa, Japan. We were there for four years. A lot of my formative kind of relationships and formative years were there in Japan. We stayed on base, went to Department of Defense schools and opened my eyes to
The importance of working with people from all walks of life, all backgrounds, that core value, I think, in organizations today is really important. I also talk about this in the book, the importance of building open systems. That's organizations that are able to assimilate information from various centers of innovation and to incorporate those really quickly into products and services.
The organizations that we build today in the United States tend to be hierarchical. They tend to be pyramid structures. Better organizations, future organizations should be more like a biological cell where you have lots of information coming in and being assimilated and worked through and finally incorporated into the organism. And those things that are bad, you kind of kick out.
And those things that are good, you make a part of the system. And that really, I think, started my journey and thinking about open systems, diversity and inclusion and how to make organizations stronger.
Yeah, absolutely. So intellectual property is really the intangibles around your business that make it what it is. So when you think about a name, a brand... human-generated content. These are things, anything that comes out of the mind of humans can be protected in intellectual property, anything that's affixed in a medium.
So if you are an artist and you conceive of an artwork or design or a painting and you put that onto canvas, that can be protected. Companies, small businesses, big businesses, they tend to focus on products and services. They tend to focus on what am I selling and protecting what I'm selling. But behind that are rights that need to be protected.
And when they're not protected, you run into issues where people can steal products. And people can copy. So IP is integral. It's part and parcel of running a good business. So when I worked at Coca-Cola, one of the very first cases that I had to work on was an inventorship dispute. And at issue was a patent, a novel patent.
gas barrier additive that coca-cola included inside of its plastic bottles that extends the shelf life of carbonated drinks so if you come up with this amazing container that can keep sodas really fizzy for a long period of time that would be protected by the idea of patents
On the other side of that, you have trademarks and trademarks are really, really powerful because they indicate source of something. A really strong trademark is Apple, for example. So an Apple, it's a fruit, right? But in the context of technology, Apple is a company and a company that makes really great products. And anytime someone sees something,
Apple logo or they see the word Apple on technology, they know where it comes from and they associate a level of quality with it. So trademarks are really important. And when I was chief IP counsel of UPS, one of the largest assets that sits on the book of business are the brands, the logos, slogans that indicate the source of the good, because there's enormous goodwill that comes along with it.
Some lesser known but really, really important forms of IP today include copyrights. With the advent of artificial intelligence, these AI systems are trained on content. And content is generated primarily by people. And so if you were an author and you write a book, that content is protected by copyright.
And so to prevent others from taking it and using it in ways that you would object to, it's important to protect those things. And companies do these. They create white papers and research and things like that all the time. So it's really important to protect that. Probably the least known and least used form of intellectual property is trade secret. And trade secrets can be so, so powerful.
They're know-how. They're confidential business information that gives you a competitive advantage that other companies don't have. So if you are a small business and you have a way of collecting data and you hold that data and no one else has that specific data set,
or you know a way of doing something that is better than the way other people do it, that's a form of knowledge of intellectual property that can be protected.
You had a process, a sales process that's different and unique and provides you a competitive advantage that other people don't have. You can protect that as a trade secret.
Showing 21–40 of 89 · page 2 of 5
← Previous
Next →