Friday and Saturday there was an intellectual property colloquium at my law school, with various IP professors from all over the country and the world converging on BU and presenting the papers they are working on. I went to all 6 of the sessions, hearing 2-3 presentations in each. I mostly went to copyright ones, but I also went to one on the rise of patent litigation and another on trademarks and domain name disputes. I figure it's time to diversify my interests.
There were also opportunities to shmooze with the presenters so I did. The faculty members all had pre-made name tags with their names and their schools in the captions. I made my own tag and listed "IP Groupie" in my caption. It was sort of interesting, because there are large gaps in my knowledge of IP (to be expected given that I've never actually taken a formal class in it), but at the same time, I could speak competently and intelligently about many IP policy issues. Having read some of the international treaties seems to give me a leg up. An interesting undercurrent to the colloquium was that the study of IP theory tends to remain provincial. That is, that people learn the paradigm operating in their own country but not necessarily that of another country or the international paradigm that's slowly standardizing local IP laws. The effects of this oversight are that the power players on the international stage can more easily force the shape of the policies to their personal liking, because no one is really going to be watching (or understanding) what's going on to stop it.
Posted 9/16, should have been closer to 9/13.
Comments (2)
It was good to meet you there, Cathy! (Have a look here)
Posted by Cédric | September 16, 2004 8:09 AM
Posted on September 16, 2004 08:09
Same here! I like your blog. It's a veritable tower of babel with all those languages going on... :-)
For readers here, Cédric gave the really good presentation on domain name disputes mentioned above.
Posted by Cathy | September 16, 2004 8:16 AM
Posted on September 16, 2004 08:16