Intellectual Property Survey

Catalog description

This course is designed to provide students with an overview of several areas of law traditionally associated with intellectual property or IP, including copyright law, which pertains to the protection of literary, musical, and artistic creations and has issues replete with First Amendment implications; patent law and trade secret law, which focus on the protection of technological works ranging from chemical formulae, to software, to biotechnology; and trademark law, which relates to the goodwill associated with corporate identity and product recognition. We will also devote time to the study of the philosophy and economics of intellectual property keeping in mind, throughout the course, the need to strike an optimal balance between incentives to create and commercialize intellectual creations on the one hand and public access to these creations on the other hand.