Neil Smith ’69 worked on an important case involving Sega, which established that an online-service provider can be liable for making copyrighted material available for downloading (Sega v. Maphia). “This was the foundation case that the Ninth Circuit relied on in granting a preliminary injunction against Napster,” he notes.
Mr. Smith, who holds three degrees from Columbia University, has worked frequently with fellow law alumni/ae. He was a patent attorney for Roland Anderson ’31, then chief patent counsel for the Atomic Energy Commission, before clerking for the late legendary patent judge Giles Rich ’29.
In 1974, he joined the IP boutique firm Limbach & Limbach, serving such clients as Visa, Reebok, and Levi Strauss. When the firm dissolved early this year, he joined Howard, Rice, Nemerovski, Canady, Falk & Rabkin in San Francisco, where he leads the Internet and new technologies intellectual property group. His work earned him the honor of being named litigator of the year in 1999 by Managing Intellectual Property magazine. “You need to be creative in Internet cases,” says Mr. Smith.
George E. (Trae) Williamson III ’00 is an associate at the Los Angeles firm Irell & Manella, where he specializes in IP transactions and entertainment law. At Columbia, he conducted research on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act with Professor Jane C. Ginsburg and June Besek of the Kernochan Center for Law, Media and the Arts.
“That experience has already proven successful in my work with Internet clients. And it helped me get into this department,” says Mr. Williamson, who has a personal interest in IP law. He is a singer/songwriter and, among his first projects was registering his own music with the Copyright Office.
