Columbia Law : A Strong Tradition

Columbia Law School is home to a group of world-renowned faculty experts as well as to the Kernochan Center for Law, Media and the Arts. Columbia students are offered a wide selection of courses, hands-on clinical training, internship opportunities, and seminars with leading domestic and international practitioners. The School also serves as the headquarters of the U.S. branch of Association Litteraire et Artistique Internationale (ALAI), an organization founded in Paris in 1878 (with Victor Hugo at the helm) to develop an international convention for the protection of literary and artistic property. During its early years, ALAI's work was critical to the development of the Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, signed at Berne, Switzerland, in 1886, and known as the Berne Convention. ALAI has participated in all subsequent deliberations leading to Berne Convention revisions. In 2001, Columbia hosted the first ALAI international conference held in the United States, on the subject "Adjuncts and Alternatives to Copyright."

During the three-day conference, almost 300 of the world's leading IP academics and practitioners representing 32 countries gathered on the Columbia campus to discuss the international challenges, issues, and pressures facing copyright law on the world's fast-changing technological landscape. Attendees explored alternatives to traditional copyright law, addressed technological protection and copyright-management systems, and discussed the relationship of copyright to trademark law.

The recent ALAI conference is but one illustration of Columbia’s leadership in IP law. At the core of the Law School’s strength in IP education is the Kernochan Center, whose programs have trained IP professionals for almost two decades. Named for Professor John M. Kernochan ’48, Nash Professor Emeritus of Law, the center offers in-depth instruction, lectures, internships, a clinic, fellowships, and publications. Students from around the world take courses and seminars on copyrights, trademarks, law and the visual arts, law and theater, law and sports, law and music, law and film, IP contracts, and international and comparative protection of intellectual property.

Many recent IP battles have involved large companies or trade associations attempting to protect their copyrighted works from the incursions of free music downloads on Napster, or the dissemination of movie DVD decryption codes by hackers. Another case, Tasini v. The New York Times, represented the culmination of an eight-year effort by individual freelance writers to protect their copyright interests in the face of the unauthorized dissemination of their works on the World Wide Web.

In Tasini v. The New York Times, freelance authors sued a number of major publishers who had made their works available for online publication in Lexis/Nexis and other electronic databases without the authors’ permission. In the tradition of the Kernochan Center’s commitment to defending the rights of individual artists and authors, Alice Haemmerli, the Law School's assistant dean for international programs and graduate studies, worked pro bono as counsel to the attorney for two of the plaintiff authors. Dean Haemmerli analyzed the issues in the case in a 1998 article published in the Columbia-VLA Journal of Law & the Arts, including the legislative history of the relevant section of the Copyright Act, the transferability of the publishers’ statutory privilege to publish collective works in the absence of written transfers of ownership by authors, and whether or not Lexis/Nexis and similar databases could qualify as “revisions” of the publishers’ collective works under the Copyright Act. She assisted in the brief and oral arguments in the Second Circuit, which (reversing the district court decision below) ruled in favor of the authors. In June 2001, citing Dean Haemmerli’s article and focusing on an issue she discussed—whether the databases presented the revisions as such, rather than requiring reassembly by the reader—the Supreme Court affirmed the Second Circuit’s decision by a vote of 7 to 2. A commentary by Dean Haemmerli on the Court’s opinion appeared in a 2002 issue of the Columbia Journal of Law & the Arts (formerly the Columbia-VLA Journal of Law & the Arts).