The most promising lawyer in my law school section, Jodi Kantor, dropped out after a semester to join Slate as a reporter. She’s since become a big-shot at the NYT, now covering national politics. She’s returned to her law school roots in writing about Sen. Obama’s teaching of constitutional law. Her article was great. Even better, though, she’s posted all those exams and is moderating a conversation about them at NYTimes.com. You can join the class here and here.
The Digital Natives project intern crew is astonishingly good this summer. They’re showing off their creative skills by making videos about issues related to young people living with technology in wired societies. The first is by Diana Kimball, about how she learned to type. The second is a multi-part series about Zack McCune’s experiences with file-sharing, the RIAA, and life in college today.
This video series is part of our public, multi-media exploration of the issues set forth in our forthcoming book, Born Digital — which comes out in a few weeks. Check out the DNs project blog for much more, as well as the project website.
I’m at a wonderful summer program hosted by the Kauffman Foundation on Law, Innovation, and Growth. They’ve convened a truly interdisciplinary crowd interested in how law can affect rates of innovation and growth. Many, though by no means all, of the conversations are about innovation in technology-related fields. All the papers presented will be posted to the web site, which (great news) seems to be open for public view as of now.
The conversation about the proper role of intellectual property — patents, especially — in promoting growth, innovation, and entrepreneurship brought to mind a recent post by Jim Moore about the Allied Security Trust. Jim and I have been working together for several years on various entrepreneurial and scholarly projects. In the past few years, he’s been digging in on this question of how the patent law can work to promote start-ups and other entrepreneurs pursuing innovations in the information technology space. He points here to the extent to which large players in the IT sector are working together to develop strong patent pools to keep smaller entrants from competing effectively against them.
This theme resonates with many of the key themes here at the Kauffman Foundation’s event. One of those themes is scale. Many presentations have implicitly or explicitly dealt with whether and how scale effects innovation. From the perspective of entrepreneurs who start and build businesses, this question of the effect of the patent law and how it’s used is crucial. If we stipulate that small-scale entrepreneurs are a key driver of economic growth and innovation generally, and that large firms are (at least) not the only home of socially beneficial innovation, then this issue of patent pools and how they are used is crucial.
I’ve been thinking a lot about what we’re studying actively at the Berkman Center, which I’ve just left as executive director. We’ve not yet done enough serious work on this question of patents and the effect on innovation, growth, and other social concerns. A few scholars at the Center have got a forthcoming paper on patents, but it’s not been an area of focused research. Over time, I think we should get more serious exploring multiple points of view about how the patent system should work in the Internet space. And plainly, the intersection between patent and competition law (or antitrust in the United States) is an essential one to understand, as Mark Lemley and his co-authors, Phil Malone, Francois Leveque and others have been. The new executive director might profitably think about how we could contribute more to this discussion.
We seem, at the Berkman Center, always to be looking for more great people to join our team. A new opening: a clinical fellow in cyberlaw. The posting is here. The job would be great for an entrepreneurial lawyer who would like to teach law students applied cyberlaw in innovative ways through our clinic. The students are extraordinary. A major added benefit is the chance to work with Prof. Phil Malone, the director of the clinic, and Dena Sacco, a wonderful lawyer and former AUSA who is also co-directing our Internet Safety Technical Task Force.
