Info/Law

I spent Friday and Saturday at this year’s Works in Progress in Intellectual Property Colloquium, graciously and efficiently hosted at American University’s Washington College of Law. (Next year it will move on to Tulane Law). The number of papers was somewhat bewildering, and the conference was organized on three concurrent tracks to cram everyone in. There was lots of interesting stuff, and also an opportunity for me to present my still-developing paper on the trademark fair use doctrine. Rebecca Tushnet has a series of good live-blogging posts about the event starting here, and including this post about the panel where I presented.

Among the many interesting papers that I got to see, some of the highlights included:

• Rebecca’s paper about the difficulty of judging “falsity” in advance, as may be required in a world of increased protection for commercial speech;

• Christine Haight Farley on interesting gender issues and a concept of the brand as a feminine entity;

• Mark McKenna’s well-reasoned argument that both sides in the “trademark use” debate are partly right and partly wrong;

• Elizabeth Townsend Gard enthusiastically launching a project to help historians and other scholars in the very complex task of ascertaining whether particular items are in the public domain;

• Dan Burk’s discussion of institutional “codification” of knowledge — converting tacit knowledge in people’s head into concrete form that others can use — and how it intersects with IP law.

The abstracts for all these papers are on the WIPIP web site, though note that they are very much works in progress (hence the name) so should not be cited or quoted and will likely change a lot before their publication. I know that mine will, thanks in part to the helpful comments I got.

Filed under: Blogging, Copyright, Law School, Patents, Scholarship, Trademarks