Welcome to The Anchor Plate
Anchor Plate: a metal plate fastened to the exterior of a brick building with a washer or tie rod to reinforce structural support, usually decorative.
The Anchor Plate: a virtual gathering place for dialogue about the nature of practicing intellectual property law, to increase knowledge and to amuse.
Well. It's great to be back in the blogosphere again. When you last heard from us, we were biglaw IP litigation partners and co-authors of Owners, Borrowers & Thieves 2.0, a fine blog (if we do say so ourselves) about IP litigation in the 21st Century. (Our good friend, the great Dave Rein, now steers that ship more ably than we ever did -- and he was nice enough to leave our old posts up, too!)
Things change, however. If you've followed the legal industry at all in the last 18 months, you know that some things have changed dramatically. Last fall, Geoff Gerber and I left our long-time jobs as partners in a large St. Louis law firm to start our own boutique intellectual property, media and entertainment law firm. We did it for a lot of reasons, most of them good (we think). Ultimately, we just wanted to practice law differently (much more on that later). So now you can find us at The BrickHouse Law Group. And you can find us here, at The Anchor Plate.
We hope to be valued participants in the dialogue -- good listeners as well as good contributors -- and we expect to have guest authors from time to time as well. We'll cover some familiar territory (fair use, copyright and parody, IP litigation, comic books, for example), but we'll also reach out into some dynamic new areas, such as open-price lawyering, cloud computing and social media, to name a few.
As with any new venture, we expect some twists and turns in the road ahead -- that's half the fun of driving. We hope you'll find it worthwhile to join us on the journey.
Pete Salsich III is an occasionally accomplished illustrator and relatively weak guitar player whose secret identity is that of an
Geoff Gerber keeps waiting for his superpowers to materialize. In the meantime, he uses his lawyer-powers to litigate intellectual property
David B. Groce is a lawyer with 25 years of experience representing clients in North America, Europe, and Asia in
Michael A. Kahn concentrates his practice in copyright, trademark, First Amendment and media law (libel, privacy rights). He is