http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/palfrey From the Berkman Center at Harvard Law School Wed, 18 Nov 2009 13:34:17 -0500 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 hourly 1 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/palfrey/my-disclosures/comment-page-1/#comment-1864 John Palfrey » Blog Archive » What should Web 2.0 entrepreneurs do about software patents? Thu, 03 Aug 2006 15:33:37 +0000 http://clem.law.harvard.edu/jpalfrey/my-disclosures/#comment-1864 [...] This conundrum is real, and I’ve learned a great deal from finding myself caught in it. As with many people who teach, I have “outside activities” beyond my work at HLS and Berkman. Outside activities are good because they help pay the mortgage in the Boston area. They are also good because you learn things about the real world and keep you from becoming an ivory tour caricature of an academic. My outside activities have been primarily as an investor in RSS-related technologies and helping real entrepreneurs found companies in this space. Outside activities are a pain in the neck because I, anyway, constantly feel a tension between my academic identity (teacher and researcher of interesting Internet law topics) and my outside-activities identity (investor and participant in the marketplace). Much of this tension can be dealth with through disclosure — more on that in a moment. Nowhere is that tension more acute than in this patent space. [...] [...] This conundrum is real, and I’ve learned a great deal from finding myself caught in it. As with many people who teach, I have “outside activities” beyond my work at HLS and Berkman. Outside activities are good because they help pay the mortgage in the Boston area. They are also good because you learn things about the real world and keep you from becoming an ivory tour caricature of an academic. My outside activities have been primarily as an investor in RSS-related technologies and helping real entrepreneurs found companies in this space. Outside activities are a pain in the neck because I, anyway, constantly feel a tension between my academic identity (teacher and researcher of interesting Internet law topics) and my outside-activities identity (investor and participant in the marketplace). Much of this tension can be dealth with through disclosure — more on that in a moment. Nowhere is that tension more acute than in this patent space. [...]

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