Murphy’s Law states that, “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.”  I am a whole hearted believer in this.  Just last week I had a computer file located on a thumb drive and nowhere else.  This is the only time I have done that, and the only time I have ever had a thumb drive completely fail.  People who know me know that I religiously park the Beemer on end parking spots.  I violated this policy once for just a minute to run into a store when I could not find such a space.  That was all it took to get my first door ding.  Of course I hardly want to begin about the importance of unforgiving mistakes from my military experience and experience filming sharks.  It can seem like we fight against a living and intelligent entity who looks for any open opportunity to cause mischief.

 The world of IP can be equally unforgiving, especially because you really do have living and intelligent entities trying to take advantage of your mistakes.  Unforeseen vulnerabilities are at the heart of our Mieza book series we published where the main character learns about IP mistakes he had never even considered until he learned the consequences the hard way.  Our hope, with these books and the IP mistakes presented here, is that you might have the opportunity to consider what could go wrong before it actually does, given that if your Murphy is like mine, he ain’t going to let you off the hook otherwise.

An important part of your job as an IP strategist is to remove unnecessary risk from the initiatives of your associated enterprises.  The mistakes presented here can help you do that.  But do not for a moment believe that these are the only mistakes.  Stay on your guard, challenge assumptions, and play the role of Murphy yourself sometimes.  See if you can make your own plans fail, and then do something about it before Murphy does.

(This is number 46 in our list of IP mistakes and how to avoid them.)

(Image credit: music2work2)