AMA Luncheon and Speaker - Brett Trout

Today the Des Moines AMA chapter hosted a luncheon featuring Brett Trout, a well-established patent attorney of the area, to speak on "The Legal Pitfalls of Social Media." They held at the Des Moines Golf & Country Club.

Let me start by prefacing that the facilities they are absolutly amazing. You reach the gates by passing through these large wrought-iron and brick pillared gates and take this long winding drive taking you through the beautifully landscaped and vast golf course. The club house is lavished in sophisticated decadence with a wealth of dark rich wood and elegant dim lighting. I mean, and this I found a bit too excessive a luxury, in the bathroom instead of paper towels there are shelves of properly folded cloth towels just for drying your hands.

Although, I will say with some home town pride, the Country Club pool I lifeguarded at back in here in Salina is leaps and bounds better. We have a 30' slide that twists and turns in thrilling spirals. They have a 5' tube slide with a 30 degree angle. Honestly the public pool here is probabally better.



But anyway, to the talk. Brett Trout is a just a fascinating guy. Not only is he the most recognizable patent attorney, if not just attorney period, within Iowa, the guy also speed races motorcycles and trains for MMA fights. That's awesome. That's living man right there man.

He explained alot of the legal issues companies come across when dealing with social medias such as twitter, blogs, facebook, etc.; issues such as plagarism, copyright infringement, slander, liable. Listening to it I am afraid to say that in all technicality I myself may be in violation of some of these issues. However, as he pointed out, legal recourse requires material harms have occured to the plaintiff, and in truth I have not put any strain on or taken away from any party in my actions. There are far bigger fish to fry as it were.

Anway if this is a matter that interest you, I know Brett would love it if you shot him a twitter or checked out his website.

www.bretttrout.com
twitter.com/BrettTrout