A Brief History of IDEA

PTC Research Foundation

The journal IDEA serves as a law journal for the Franklin Pierce Law Center and was originally broadly directed to the problem of interfaces of law, science, technology, medicine and the creative arts, generally. Issued quarterly, it has served as a major medium of communication and is also available for the work of individual scholars. IDEA is devoted to the publication of scientific-legal research regarding the principles, the facts, and the practical operations of the patent, trademark, copyright and related systems of the United States and other countries. It has been calculated efficiently to educate and inform across broad fields the general reader and those with special interests from business, industry, the sciences and the professions with respect to the functioning of these systems. It is dedicated to convey to this readership the relation of the systems to industrial and social progress.

Volume one of IDEA issued in 1957 by the PTC Research Foundation. Established in 1949 as a nonprofit foundation at George Washington University, the well-known PTC Research Foundation is now the research and educational arm of the Academy of Applied Science relating to intellectual property, including patents, trademarks, copyrights and scientific or technical information. Many current intellectual property practitioners, academicians, industrialists and government officials may have forgotten the genesis of the Patent, Trademark and Copyright (PTC) Research Foundation. The PTC was founded by the patent section of the American Bar Association, and was intended to serve the United States and the world.

Pierce Law

In 1973, Robert Rines founded the Franklin Pierce Law Center with a specialty in training lawyers in the area of intellectual property law. The same year it was founded, the Law Center also became the home of the Patent, Trademark and Copyright Research Foundation and IDEA. In 1999, the Academy, recognizing the importance of continuously advancing education, knowledge and understanding of the law as it affects the progress of science and the useful arts in innovative processes, became the official home for the Foundation. IDEA remained a Pierce Law publication at the time of the relocation of the PTC in 1999 where it continues to serve as a well respected intellectual property law review of academic note with interdisciplinary and practical features.

IDEA Archive

The IP Mall is happy to provide the world with free access to articles from three decades of IDEA. For more recent issues visit the Pierce Law Web. These issues in this collection are not available on the premium fee based research services Lexis and Westlaw. The electronic version of these issues has been provided to the Pierce Law IP Mall free of charge by Hein Online. Hein Online is a revolutionary online product available from an American legal publisher with more than 80 years experience in serving the academic law library market worldwide.

Since its launching in 2000, this valuable research database has received great acclaim, earning both the Best Commercial Website Award from the International Association of Law Libraries in 2002 and the Best New Product Award from the American Association of Law Libraries in 2001.

All of the library modules are image-based (PDF) and fully searchable, meaning that they provide exact page images and enable the researcher to view all pages as they originally appeared in hard copy, including all charts, graphs and photographs! Also, the libraries in Hein Online provide comprehensive coverage from the inception of each publication, something no other online publisher currently offers. All told, more than four centuries of content are available in Hein Online.