I wrote this book with the goal of helping people understand our intellectual property system as a human endeavor, a social and economic force that drives innovation, a manifestation of creativity and trade, a sometimes crude balance between exclusivity and access, and a topic worthy of study, teaching, learning, and practice. My hope is that such understanding can lead people from crude generalities about what's good or bad about the system, toward more productive pursuits like how to make it work better.

Writing the book has also helped me understand the larger significance of my work as a patent attorney, in a global context, along the arc of history. Since finishing law school in 1984, my career has involved helping clients put their ideas to work, mainly pharmaceutical, biotechnological, and other industrial companies and universities from the U.S., Europe, and Japan, by obtaining patents, registering trademarks, licensing rights, and arguing about them in court. I learned to see intellectual property law as the invisible infrastructure of innovation, underlying most of modern society. I also spent a few years practicing environmental law and saw firsthand how the promise at the leading edge of innovation can lead to problems at the trailing edge, and I have long been disturbed by that contradiction.

Since about 1990, I have had the opportunity to see how intellectual property affects widely different communities around the world – participating in negotiations about biodiversity between Fijian villagers and a pharmaceutical company, cross-legged on straw mats drinking kava kava with tribal officials; waiting for the generator to kick on each time there was a power outage during a presentation to plant breeders and other agricultural researchers in Nigeria; working with researchers in developing countries suffering from malaria and subject to military unrest, authoritarian oversight, and lack of funds; witnessing the contrast between technology haves and have-nots, side by side in India; marveling at how the most modern genomic sequencing technology can help traditional herdsmen in Kenya cure their livestock.