Courses in years past were limited to an introduction to copyright law, and alternate offerings of patent law and trademark law. A course in cyberspace law was introduced in the 1990s. Today, traditional courses in copyright, patent, and trademark provide the foundation for such courses as Electronic Commerce: Law, Technology & Business; Strategic Intellectual Property; Biotechnology and IP Rights; The Future of Ideas; and Intellectual Property in a New Technological Age. Tara Elliott, 3L, recalls: “My goal, as a 1L, was to take all the IP courses the school had to offer; by my third year, however, there were more IP classes than I could fit into my schedule.”
Eldred v. Ashcroft, decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in January, is the prime example. Gorman calls it “the biggest case ever in copyright.” The Court upheld the 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act which lengthened the duration of copyrights by 20 years to “life plus 70 years,” raising a spectrum of legal issues. In fact, federal approaches to IP issues are among the current research
of Polk Wagner, who specializes in patent law. He is working on an empirical
study of the Federal Circuit’s patent claim construction methodology and
an analysis of contemporary control-based criticisms of intellectual property
laws. “I’m deeply skeptical about the common criticism of intellectual
property laws as inherently destructive of the public domain of ideas
and information, and thus may, in the long run, diminish intellectual
activity,” says Wagner. “In fact, I think that on most analyses, intellectual
property rights can be — and have been — tremendous forces in increasing
the quantity of information from which creators and inventors can build.
In my view, as long as we get the incentive structures right, ‘open’ information
will grow right along with — and often well beyond — the proprietary.”
|
|||||
| Previous Page | Next Page | ||||
