News and Events

IP Events

IP Speaker Series: Marcia B. Paul
November 9, 2009
12:10 p.m. - 1:10 p.m.
Jerome L. Greene Hall, room 105
Join us as we welcome Marcia B. Paul, CLS alumna and partner at Davis Wright Tremaine LLP.  Ms. Paul's extensive and distinguished career in copyright litigation includes representing some of the biggest names in publishing, broadcasting and media. She will speak about her experiences as a partner in one of the nation's leading law firms and highlight the trends and issues she sees in intellectual property litigation.  Please join us for this pizza lunch and discussion.

Lost and Found: A Pratical Look at Orphan Works
October 20, 2009
A panel discussion co-sponsored by the Kernochan Center for Law, Media, and the Arts and the New York City Bar Association. Tuesday, October 20, 2009 at 6pm, free and open to the public, details and registration here.

IP Faculty in the News

BUSINESS WEEK
Does Intel Hold an Edge in Antitrust Case?
Nov. 10, 2009
Simply being a monopoly isn't against the law; it's how a company behaves once it reaches that point that matters most in courts, say legal experts. "Under U.S. law, it's O.K. to be a monopoly—and even to charge monopoly prices," says Scott Hemphill, a law professor at Columbia University. "What's not O.K. is conduct that's aimed at unreasonably prolonging and maintaining that monopoly."

BUSINESS STANDARD (INDIA)
Method Mania
Nov. 11, 2009
Eben Moglen, director of the Software Freedom Law Centre is emphatic that business process patents should never have been allowed in the first place. Patent law, he says, cannot award ownership of facts of nature, or mere mental activities, or algorithms because the Supreme Court has been unambiguous on that point for more than 150 years.

AOL (The Digital Age)
What are the Limits of Drones?
Nov. 6, 2009
Matthew Waxman appears on this program to discuss are drones good or bad? Drones have killed 20 al Qaeda leaders and up to 600 militants since 2006. They have also killed up to 300 plus innocent civilians.

WASHINGTON POST
N.Y. Files Antitrust Lawsuit against Intel
Nov. 5, 2009
"This is a notoriously gray area in U.S. antitrust law," said Scott Hemphill, professor of antitrust law at Columbia University.

THE DAILY KOS
Net Neutrality Red Herrings and How to Combat Them
Nov. 5, 2009
[Y]ou can comment in support of the FCC rule that would establish Net Neutrality at the new FCC blog set up at OpenInternet.gov. In doing so, be sure to note a deficiency in the proposed rule highlighted by a group of Net Neutrality proponents, including Tim Wu, chair of the public interest group Free Press and other public policy professors.

SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
FTC Also Likely to Move on Intel
Nov. 4, 2009
"Often states and the FTC act together, so this could be a harbinger," said Scott Hemphill, professor of antitrust law at Columbia Law School. It's not clear that the facts have changed in the past year."

PORTFOLIO.COM
Cuomo Sues Intel
Nov. 4, 2009
But the case could hinge on whether what Cuomo calls bribes were really bribes, or loyalty discounts. And whether those loyalty discounts amounted to contracts that excluded computer makers from using others' products, or whether they amounted to predatory pricing, said Columbia Law School Associate Professor C. Scott Hemphill.

ADA EVENING NEWS (OK)
The Internet and Net Neutrality
Nov. 4, 2009
'The idea is that a maximally useful public information network aspires to treat all content, sites, and platforms equally," said Columbia Law professor Tim Wu at www.timwu.org. 'This allows the network to carry every form of information and support every kind of application."

ANTI-DISMAL (BLOG)
Heller on Gridlock and the Tragedy of the Anti-Commons
Nov. 3, 2009
Michael Heller of Columbia Law School and author of The Gridlock Economy talks to EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the book and the idea that fragmented ownership is a barrier to innovation. Heller makes an analogy between the tragedy of the commons and what he calls the tragedy of the anti-commons--the problem of bundling together numerous individual claims to a resource.

MEDIA POST
Net Neutrality Proponents Warn FCC of Loopholes in Regulations
Nov. 3, 2009
Five law professors sent the FCC a letter on Monday stating that those ambiguities "appear likely to provide particularly generous opportunities to try to work around the Commission's efforts." The letter was signed by Yale's Jack Balkin, South Texas College's John Blevins, University of Louisville's Jim Chen, Harvard's Larry Lessig, Stanford's Barbara van Schewick and Columbia's Tim Wu.

HUFFINGTON POST
An Important Patent-Law Precedent Approaches
Nov. 2, 2009
Eben Moglen: So now, shorn of all the technicalities, the Supreme Court gets a chance to say whether it means what it's always said, or whether it wants to endorse the fast and flashy round-heeled patent system we were running during the boom times. Of course, it can always do nothing at all, or make a new alternative that wasn't there before; that's what being the Supreme Court means, as any Legal Realist will tell you.

EXCLUSIVE RIGHTS (BLOG)
Wu on Fair Use and the Fairey Hope Image
Nov. 2, 2009
Tim Wu, Professor of Law at Columbia and blogger, wrote an article for Slate last week titled "Is There 'Hope' for Shepard Fairey? How does fair-use law work, anyway?" The article strikes me as good vehicle to explain fair use to people who are just starting to explore copyright in that it is sufficiently wonky to dig beneath the surface of a sometimes murky issue, but at the same, written in prose that is geared towards a broader audience.

WASHINGTON POST
Biggest Net Neutrality Boosters Question FCC Proposal
Nov. 2, 2009
"We trust Genachowski," said Tim Wu, a law professor at Columbia University and chairman of public interest group Free Press . Wu co-wrote the letter. "But this is a historic rule and this letter was in the spirit of looking at other FCCs and creating a stronger rule that sets a policy that lasts longer as opposed to something that is highly dependent on the whims of a commission in power."

THE H OPEN
In re Bilski, Let us Get Back to Work
Oct. 28, 2009
Patents on software are, in effect, a tax on ideas. Eben Moglen of the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) takes the view that: "Software patenting has been a scourge in the global technology industries," and that "computer programs should be as ineligible for patent protection as mathematical equations or precise descriptions of physical laws."

TECH PRESIDENT (BLOG)
Believable Change: A Reality Check on Online Participation
Oct. 27, 2009
According to Columbia University law professor Eben Moglen, when relevant public information can reach interested people with sufficient structure, "government learns it has users." A longtime champion in the free software movement, Moglen says that if government provides usable data "without platformizing it or productizing it," then people will engage "not in some Platonic way, but at the fish market, in the schools, in the places where they want to take action."

KANSAS CITY STAR
Ostrom and Williamson win Nobel Prize in Economics
Oct. 12, 2009
At the other extreme common property can be unexploited or underexploited as explained by Michael Heller in his book "The Gridlock Economy." Heller notes that joint ownership can make negotiating a contract almost impossible when each member has veto power. Ostrom's research explains how common property can be managed effectively.

CBS NEWS.COM
Figuring Out Free Speech on the Internet
Oct. 12, 2009
As Timothy Wu of Columbia Law School puts it, a "battle royal [is] underway over what the norms of the wireless world will be--more open, like computers, or closed, like telephones." The FCC will have to decide whether we're moving to a world where you can attach your mobile phone to any wireless network, the same way you hook up your telephone or computer.

ALIBI.COM
“Broad” Support?
Oct. 8, 2009
No sentient mayor is talking about free citywide wireless anymore, including Mayor Chavez. The reason is fairly simple, according to Columbia Law School professor … Tim Wu, who, in 2007, wrote a notable piece for Slate titled, “Where’s My Free Wi-Fi? Why Municipal Networks Have Been Such A Flop.” Cities missed it by seeing citywide wi-fi as a trendy social perk. Cities, Wu counters, should have viewed access as a public utility instead.

BROADCASTING & CABLE
(Similar articles also appeared in Daily Finance and Ars Technica)
Law Professors Support FCC in Comcast, Bit Torrent Case
Oct. 6, 2009
A quintet of law professors including familiar names to net neutrality debates, Lawrence Lessig of Harvard and Tim Wu of Columbia, have weighed in with the court in support of the FCC's finding against Comcast in the BitTorrent case.

SURPRISINGLY FREE (Blog)
Wu (2006) is Right on Google Book Search
Oct. 4, 2009
Scanning books is expensive, but not so expensive that we need the government or a regulated utility provider (as Tim Wu suggests) to do it. If a fair use exemption or other workaround was available, I’m sure we’d see more than one competitor jump into the space. Like Prof. Wu understood in 2006, and as Google knows now, there is lots of money to be made in hyper-narrow niches.

SURPRISINGLY FREE (Blog)
Debate: Michael Heller v. Richard Epstein
Oct. 2, 2009
Michael Heller opened the debate with the idea that when too many people own pieces of one thing, nobody can use it. Ownership structure, not just private property rights per se, are what is important. Too much ownership (fragmented, badly designed, or mis-specified ownership rights) creates gridlock and this is one of the biggest problems in the modern economy.