Non-Faculty IPSC Scholars

I missed this year's IP Scholars Conference at Stanford because of clerking, but the IPSC website has abstracts and papers, the conference schedule, and recordings of each session (although some recordings seem to be linked to the wrong session title). So I thought that like last year, I would highlight the work of IP scholars without a tenure-track faculty position, whom I have attempted to group into VAPs & Fellows, graduate students, and practitioners. Please contact me with corrections, and if you were at IPSC, feel free to post a comment about your favorite talk!

VAPs & Fellows:

• Jeremy Bock is a fellow at Berkeley who argued for a neutral third-party litigant in patent litigation.
• Stefania Fusco is a VAP at DePaul who compared NPEs in the US and the EU.
• Andrew Gilden is a fellow at Stanford who argued that limits on available copyright remedies have led to an expansion of substantive rights, entrenching dominant interests under the guise of protecting free speech and expression.
• Paul Gugliuzza is a VAP at the University of Florida who argued that the Federal Circuit has favored rules that enlarge its own influence over patent law at the expense of other institutions, which in part stems from its specific charges from Congress. (Note that Derik Sanders has recently blogged about Gugliuzza's Rethinking Federal Jurisdiction, which he presented in the same session as me at IPSC 2011.)
• Christina Mulligan is a fellow at the Yale Law Information Society Project, and she presented on her article, Scaling the Patent System (coauthor: Timothy B. Lee), which has been discussed in the Washington Post.
• Sarah Rajec is a fellow at Stanford who proposed a framework to discuss flexibilities in international IP law and analyzed the suitability of different institutions to implement these flexibilities.
• Alexandra Roberts is a VAP at BU who discussed a speech-act theory of distinctiveness in trademark law.

Graduate students:

• Kate Darling is a Ph.D. candidate in IP Law & Economics at MIT who presented on online adult entertainment, where IP enforcement is prohibitively difficult.
• Steffen Juranek is a Ph.D. candidate at Goethe University Frankfurt who argued that asymmetric stake size and information in patent litigation impedes settlement (coauthor: Axel Haus).
• Jerry Liu is a J.S.D. candidate at Stanford who argued that the current copyright market remains the best solution for development of the music industry in the digital age.
• Blake Reid is pursuing an LL.M. in advocacy at Georgetown and discussed content accessibility.
• Tal Niv is a JSP student at Berkeley who discussed an empirical study involving Flickr, which I cannot understand from the abstract, though it sounds potentially interesting.

Practitioners:

• Matt Dowd is an associate at Wiley Rein who discussed a national database for IP violation (coauthor: Brian Love).
• Charles Tait Graves is a partner at Wilson Sonsini who argued that courts have overlooked patent preemption of state law trade secret claims alleging employee wrongdoing (coauthor: Elizabeth Tippett).
• Stuart Graham is the Chief Economist at the USPTO who discussed how patent fees were set under the AIA (coauthor: Galen Hancock).
• Jonathan Hillel, an associate at Skadden, and Samantha Zyontz, a research manager at Harvard Business School, are co-authors with Michael Mazzeo on an empirical analysis of patent infringement awards.
• Eran Kahana is a senior corporate counsel for DataCard Corp. and a non-resident fellow at Stanford who discussed IP infringement by artificial intelligence applications.
• Eric Lane is of counsel at McKenna Long & Aldridge, and he argued for harmonization of green patent fast-track programs.
• Erez Reuveni is a DOJ attorney and a non-resident fellow at Stanford who "suggest[ed] modifications to copyright law and policy that foster a system where the brain's cognitive architecture interfaces effectively with the Internet to achieve copyright’s core goal of encouraging creativity."
• Saurabh Vishnubhakat advises the USPTO's Chief Economist and discussed an empirical study of patent infringement litigation.
• James Yoon is a partner at Wilson Sonsini and Adjunct Professor at Santa Clara argued for an expansion of the "customer suit" exception to venue rules.