business is not a meritocracy
posted 2005.04.11
This is not new:
Patents, trademarks and other legal measures of protection were, so far as I understand, created in our legal systems to protect equally the interests of the small and large business, the unknown and crazily popular inventor, the household name and the underdog.
And yet.
These legal measures of protection (or, to be more accurate, the legal application and defense of same) are not created equally. Oh, sure, for a few hundred or thousand you can HAVE this legal protection. But if you want to DEFEND it, fight for your own valid claims or the ridiculous claims of others, it's not an equal world. It is most decidedly a world of the haves and the have-nots. If you are a large corporation with deep pockets and enough litigators to run a small country, you can sue, threaten, or otherwise intimidate small companies into giving up, giving in, closing down or going away.
Regardless of whether you're in the right or not.
Which, to be specific, is the part that bugs me.
The reality is that most micro businesses can't afford tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees, whether it's to pursue and protect their own interests or to defend completely ridiculous claims made by corporations with more muscle than brains.
They end up backing down. Even when every cell and every fibre says to fight. They end up backing down. Because there is more than a business at stake. There is home and family and savings and educating children and car payments and being able to afford your next meal, pal.
What's more, the deep-pocket-lifeforce-sucking corporations know that, too. And don't you think for a minute that they don't use it to their advantage.
It just sickens me that this entire system, democratic as it SEEMS, is actually the domain of big boys. Said a different way: deep corporate pockets can buy you an awful lot of time. Each legal move you make doesn't have to make sense. Batter's averages are OK. Your business's future does not depend on every decision being critically smart.
Lessons to learn, as I enter the corporate world. I need to grow big enough to not care about this stuff any more. Apparently.
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I wonder if the change of landscape brought around by blogs - in a media awareness sense - makes a difference.
If that big corporation starts noticing that it's sales are affected by the adverse publicity drummed up by "grass roots" support, then maybe it'll cause a few of them to just.. pause a little?
OK, maybe not at the moment but surely sometime in the future...