Course | Columbia Law School

This seminar explores the changing nature of intellectual property liability, and specifically secondary liability, on the Internet and in the broader digital world. We begin by tracing the roots of secondary intellectual property liability and the Sony Betamax decision, then move into the Internet era, covering such issues as peer-to-peer file sharing and the Grokster decision, online speech liability, Internet auctions, rebroadcasting television, Internet VCRs, digital video recorders, MP3 devices, Internet radio, pop-up advertising, Google Book Search, YouTube, MySpace, and cross-border application and impact of the intellectual property laws. Along the way, we also study the various legislative modifications to the intellectual property laws in response to the Internet, notably the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the Communications Decency Act. The seminar aims to illuminate not only how law impacts the Internet, but how Internet-era technologies and services are, in turn, redefining intellectual property law itself.