Prof. Jane C. Ginsburg, Columbia University School of Law* April 19, 2012 On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the Fordham International Intellectual Property Conference, its organizer, Prof. Hugh Hansen, planned a session on “Copyright Law: Where has it been, where is it going?” and asked me to look back over the 20 years [...]

Prof. Doug Lichtman, UCLA School of Law April 2, 2012 Author and investment advisor James Altucher has been attracting a lot of attention the last few days.  On Saturday, he published an article with the headline, “Why Google Might Be Going to $0”; his story is about a new patent lawsuit brought against Google where [...]

Prof. Randal C. Picker, University of Chicago Law School March 26, 2012 As I am fond of reminding people, faculty offices at my work home, The University of Chicago Law School, surround the library.  I walk out of my office into book stacks.  So it can hardly come as a surprise when I say that [...]

Rodney A. Smolla, President, Furman University March 20, 2012 How do assertions that the government possesses legally enforceable intellectual property interests that allow it to control and license access to governmentally sponsored entertainment and athletic events square with the First Amendment? In a prior IP Viewpoints post on this site, I argued that the United [...]

Prof. Jane C. Ginsburg, Columbia University School of Law* February 28, 2012 The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) is discussing a possible treaty that would obligate member states to adopt exceptions and limitations to assist the access of the visually impaired to works of authorship.1  The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and the Copyright Office [...]

Professor Peter S. Menell1 University of California at Berkeley School of Law February 13, 2012 Throughout history, technologies for instantiating, reproducing, and distributing information have evolved in tandem with the creative industries that cultivate, fund, and distribute literature, music, film, and art.  Although the relationship between these technology and content industries is often characterized in [...]

Prof. Doug Lichtman, UCLA School of Law February 6, 2012 A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about the RAND commitment, explaining how technology firms often license patents not by explicitly agreeing as to price, but instead by more vaguely agreeing to license their patents on “reasonable” and “non-discriminatory” terms.  As I explained in [...]

Rodney A. Smolla, President, Furman University January 30, 2012 In Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association v. Gannett Co., Inc.,1 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit rejected a claim by Gannett that its newspapers had a First Amendment right to broadcast high school athletic games, despite an exclusive licensing agreement that had licensed broadcast [...]

Prof. Jane C. Ginsburg, Columbia University School of Law January 23, 2012 This column1 follows on the entry of Aug. 29, 2011, which addressed the international copyright law status of works first disclosed in digital format over the Internet, and not subsequently “published” in hardcopy formats.  The prior column concluded that under the definition of [...]

Prof. James Gibson, University of Richmond School of Law January 10, 2012 In the previous entry in this series, I discussed the narrow foundations of trademark law and its more recent expansion – in particular, how new approaches to trademark liability have departed from the law’s traditional focus on disputes about the source of competing [...]