#IPSC18 Preview: General IP

This week I've been previewing all 140+ abstracts for the 18th Annual IP Scholars Conference next week at Berkeley, with patents & innovation on Monday, copyright on Tuesday, trademarks on Wednesday, and design/trade secrets/publicity yesterday. Here are all the remaining panels, in which multiple areas of IP are combined (either in individual papers or across the panel). Looking forward to seeing everyone next week!

• Breakout 2 – IP History and Theory
• Stephanie Bair – Stress and sleep deprivation disproportionately impact disadvantaged groups and impact their ability to innovate, contributing to IP inequalities.
• Carys Craig – IP law requires a critical legal studies approach that transcends its disturbed economic framework and injustices rather than couching critique within its terms.
• Jeremy Sheff – Recognizing that Jefferson's view of IP was actually within the natural law tradition can open debates across the utilitarian/Lockean line.
• Toshiko Takenaka – Industry 4.0—based on non-physical information—suggests patent law is outdated.
• Breakout 3 – IP and Creativity
• Jeanne Fromer & Mark Lemley – Play is important to innovation, and patent and copyright laws devalue play by failing to see that creations of play are sometimes important enough not to protect.
• Sean Pager – IP norms scholars should learn from critiques applied to earlier waves of "law & norms" scholarship.
• Andres Sawicki – Although IP scholars focused on the economics of public goods and those focused on psychological and sociological research on creativity appear to be operating under conflicting assumptions, their work can be integrated.
• Christopher Sprigman – Adult entertainment industry and the digital revolution.
• Breakout 4 – Old and New Theories of IP
• Shyamkrishna Balganesh – Courts have been (and should be) at the center of copyright law-making, despite the copyright statute.
• Uri Hacohen & Peter Menell – Deceptive endorsement (fake followers, forged reviews) should be subject to legal liability.
• Irina Manta – Public choice theory helps explain the disparity between criminal sanctions in patents and in other areas of IP.
• Peter Menell – Courts' growing and uncritical use of purported kinship between different areas of IP masks critical differences.
• Breakout 6 – IP and Academic Institutions (2 papers on patents, 2 on copyrights)
• Stefania Fusco, Francesco Lissoni, Catalina Martinez & Valerio Sterzi – A new dataset of university patent transfers shows the impact such assignments have on innovation and whether universities have followed the monetization trends of other NPEs.
• Ariel Katz & Patrick Pang – Controlled digital lending, a U.S. practice of loaning digital copies of books without permission from the copyright owner, is likely to be legally permissible in Canada.
• Lisa Larrimore Ouellette & Andrew Tutt – Based on royalty-sharing policies from 152 universities, we do not find that higher royalties for faculty scientists lead to more invention disclosures, patent applications, or licensing income, suggesting that many university patent royalties may be misallocated.
• Argyri Panezi – Proposed EU copyright reforms that would make cultural heritage works more accessible online, which are criticized by most European scholars as too modest, are compared with comparable rules in the U.S. and Canada.
• Breakout 6 – AI and IP
• Kathrine Gutierrez – IP protection for certified indices such as LIBOR would encourage their production and limit incentives for index manipulation. (Would a combination of non-IP carrots and sticks be a better solution? Also, why is this part of an AI panel?)
• Andrew Selbst – Explores when governments or businesses might be liable for discrimination by AI decisionmakers. (Andrew is another promising junior scholar; see more here.)
• Charlotte Tschider – AI innovations are difficult to protect with IP. (Though as the abstract notes, AI investment has skyrocketed.)
• Peter Yu – Should there be a new data producer's right to protect machine-generated data? (I'm not sure what Peter's answer is from the abstract, but I haven't been convinced by the "yes" arguments I've seen so far.)
• Breakout 6 – Tort-Tinged IP
• Ben Depoorter & Robert Walker – Attracting litigation is deployed strategically by IP defendants to attain free publicity.
• Mark McKenna & Mark Lemley – Courts should avoid conflating an incumbent's desire to prevent disruption with infringement of an IP right by holding that market disruption is relevant to an IP case only if the disruption was traceable to the act of infringement itself.
• Betsy Rosenblatt – Rules for apportioning IP ownership among multiple creators are compared with apportionment of responsibility among multiple tortfeasors.
• Guy Rub [canceled] – The recent elimination of the laches defense in copyright and patent makes these regimes inconsistent with other areas of law and creates uncertainty and unfairness.
• Closing Plenary
• Tonya Evans – Explores the copyright implications of scarce digital resources, including CryptoKitties (tradable digital cats).
• Deepa Varadarajan & Joseph Fishman – Trade secrecy currently focuses almost exclusively on whether the defendant's innovation process had advantages due to familiarity with the secret, but it ought to also examine the defendant's product. Copyright law offers the best blueprint for improvement.
• Kristelia Garcia & Justin McCrary – Most recorded copyrighted music earns the majority of its lifetime revenue in the first 5-10 years following release, and the societal cost of protection beyond this point likely outweighs the benefit.
• Rachel Sachs – Intermediate innovations in the life sciences ought to be incentivized and regulated differently from end-stage technologies.