Is the patent system spurring an unprecedented era of medical advances, or impoverishing the developing world and hurting software development? We take for granted e-mail, the web, and blogs, but is a neutral Internet crucial to what we’ve come to expect? We are blessed with the ability to copy and distribute content around the world — but can authors survive in a world of free copying?
Such issues of law and technology are some of the hardest questions of our era. They are the ongoing concern of Columbia’s Program on Law and Technology, directed by Professors Scott Hemphill, Clarisa Long, and Timothy Wu.
“The program brings some of our greatest legal talent to the study of legal conditions that affect the most innovative sectors of the global economy,” says Dean David Schizer. “The questions the program addresses are crucial to the economy of the 21st century.”
Using New York City as a laboratory, the program brings together academics, public officials, judges, lawyers, policy makers, and other experts to study the range of issues surrounding IP rights, licensing, telecommunications, technological innovation, and the control of personal and commercially valuable information.
The program covers the breadth of IP law and related fields, including patent, copyright, telecommunications and other forms of industry regulation, and trade law.
Is the patent system spurring an unprecedented era of medical advances, or impoverishing the developing world and hurting software development? We take for granted e-mail, the web, and blogs, but is a neutral Internet crucial to what we’ve come to expect? We are blessed with the ability to copy and distribute content around the world — but can authors survive in a world of free copying?