BPG Radio - All IP All the Time

You are the owner of a website on the humor of Millard Fillmore (www.crazymillardfillmore.com - this is not a real site).  Someone searches on Google for “millard fillmore humor.”  One website.  Website found.  But what if you have a website on printer cartridges.  Get in line.  There are over 3 million sites returned on a Google search for ”printer cartridges” (www.re-inks.com, a real site, came up first today).  How do you get your penniless startup website higher on the search rankings??   Another real scenario: your e-tailer client gets sued for trademark infringement and has to change the domain name it has been using for the last 8 years.  How do you transition to a new site without a catastophic loss of page rank and sales?  You need to know the mysteries of search engine optimization (SEO).  Our guest Peter Quale (see picture), an independent search engine optimizer, tells all: what is SEO, how to move your site up in page rank, and how to recover from a domain name change.  And of course we discuss the underbelly of SEO:  poison words, spamdexing, page cloaking, and link farming and other things you should not do (Peter says so).

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What do newspapers know about trade secrets?  Who cares… You are a reporter and you are on fire.  A great story is brewing about corporate fraud, false product testing, corrupt board members (what else can we add)… and the source is legit.  An insider providing real documents, real names, real numbers.  This will be a corporate takedown (like that tobacco movie).  Trouble is - a lot of this stuff is flat-out trade secret information - confidential and valuable technical and financial information.  Here’s a twist - the editor’s on your back all the time and you’ve had it.  You’re going to jump ship and carry this killer story (a “trade secret”??) crosstown to “the other paper.”  Now you’re in double trade secret trouble.  What’s a good journalist to do? 

We didn’t have a clue.  So we called some people:  Professor Mark Neuzil, former Chair of the Journalism Department at the University of Saint Thomas (in the fair city of Saint Paul) and Doug Glass, News Editor at the Associated Press-Minnesota.  We explored how news media deal with trade secrets - those they’re getting from sources and those they want to protect from competitors.  Think “Think Secret” and Par Ridder (google for the goods).  While we had them cornered, we also chatted briefly about plagiarism detection (more to come later). 

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Remember the promises that, despite the fact that manufacturing jobs were leaving the US, value-added Information Age jobs (such as IT) would stick around.  Then we watched as office jobs walked across the land bridge to India and other destinations.  What about the practice of law?  Certainly no profession has better been able to protect its turf than the legal one?  Why - lawyers in one state can’t enter the courtroom in a neighboring state without associating with a  local attorney or taking another exam.  Double-licensed patent attorneys really have nothing to fear… right??  What then to think of some US law firms moving patent and trademark prosecution and litigation-related services to India?  Is this the end of US law practice as we know it - or just a way to offer more client services at lower cost?  Ernest speaks with J.R. Maddox, Esq., Director of IP Services at Lexadigm Solutions, LLC (www.lexadigm.com), a global outsourcing service provider, on the promise and peril of IP offshoring. 

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