Intellectual Property

The Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University has announced its Institute for Rebooting Social Media’s inaugural cohort of Visiting Scholars.

Harvard Law Professor Rebecca Tushnet says that, despite the $73 million settlement between Sandy Hook families and Remington Arms, victims of future gun crimes still ‘face an uphill road.’

Harvard Law Today recently spoke to Professors Terry Fisher and Ruth Okediji about COVID-19 vaccine challenges in the global south, waiving drug-maker patents, and what they propose to reform the system in time for the next pandemic.

Described as one of the great figures in the history of Harvard Law School, Lloyd L. Weinreb ’62, a leading authority on criminal and copyright law, and an HLS professor for nearly a half-century, died Dec. 15, at the age of 85.

Social media’s business model of personalized virality is incompatible with democracy, agreed experts at a recent Harvard Law School discussion on the state of democracy.

With the start of the academic year, a look at nine faculty who have joined Harvard Law School, been promoted, or taken on new roles in 2021.

Maureen E. “Molly” Brady, an expert in property law, was named a professor of law, effective July 1.

Keyon Lo LL.M. ’21 hopes to combine his legal and artistic skills to promote fairness and diversity

The high-priced sales of creative NFTs have recently become ubiquitous. Harvard Law Today asked intellectual property law expert Rebecca Tushnet to help make sense of the NFT boom.

In her Last Lecture, Ruth Okediji encouraged the graduating class to cultivate the courage to try something new.

The 2020 Last Lecture Series is an HLS tradition where selected faculty members impart insight, advice, and final words of wisdom to the graduating class. Speakers this year included Dehlia Umunna, Daphna Renan, Ruth Okediji, and Naz Modirzadeh.

Rebecca Tushnet, the inaugural Frank Stanton Professor of the First Amendment and a director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, testified before the U.S. Senate Judiciary's Subcommittee on Intellectual Property, on Feb. 11, on “The Digital Millennium Copyright Act at 22: What is it, why was it enacted, and where are we now?”

The “Innovation, Justice and Globalization” conference, hosted by HLS professor and leading intellectual property scholar Ruth Okediji, brought international academics and policymakers to campus to discuss intellectual property issues.

With the start of the academic year, four new scholars have joined the ranks of the Harvard Law School faculty and two have been promoted to professor of law.

Maureen E. “Molly” Brady, an expert in property law, land use law, local government law, legal history and intellectual property law, has joined the Harvard Law School faculty as assistant professor of law.

New report from Facebook summarizes next steps in a plan to establish an independent content oversight board. For Noah Feldman, who first proposed the idea, helping develop a new approach to one of the most vexing challenges confronting social media has been one of the most exciting things in his professional life.

Few people at Harvard or elsewhere manage to pack more activity into a workday than Memme Onwudiwe '19.

Nearly a decade after Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning shared classified materials with WikiLeaks, the site’s founder, Julian Assange, was arrested in London for his role in the disclosures. The Harvard Gazette recently spoke with three faculty members, including Yochai Benkler, the Harvard Law professor who has publicly defended the disclosure as whistleblowing.

A team of researchers from Harvard Law School, Harvard Medical School and MIT have published a new article in Science, the peer-reviewed academic journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, that suggests that medical artificial intelligence systems could be vulnerable to adversarial attacks.

Monika Bickert, head of global policy management at Facebook, joined Harvard Law Professor Jonathan Zittrain for a wide-ranging conversation hosted by the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, about the social media giant’s policies and its evolution--including some tough questions from audience members on the company’s recent headline-making controversies.

Virginia Eubanks recently joined the Berkman Klein Center for a discussion of her book, “Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor,” and the impact algorithms can have on different segments of society.

In a Q&A with the Harvard Gazette, Urs Gasser LL.M. ’03, executive director of the Berkman Klein Center, discusses what might be done to protect users from companies that profit from people’s data.

AI-based tools are increasingly being used by people and organizations in positions of authority to make important, often life-altering decisions. A new report from the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society addresses this issue and weighs the positive and negative impacts of AI on human rights.

As part of a cooperative agreement between the two schools, Harvard Law Professors Glenn Cohen, Holger Spamann, and Lucie White traveled to France in June to teach at the eighth annual Intensive Doctoral Week (IDW) at the law school of the Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris, more commonly known as “Sciences Po.”

Summer reading: From a queer critical legal studies approach to law reform, to a memoir about growing up bi-racial, to a biography of Chief Justice Marshall.

It’s been two decades since Harvard Law School Professor Lawrence Lessig published ‘The Laws of Cyberspace;’ recently, an event at the Berkman Klein Center celebrated how that groundbreaking paper provided structure to the Center's field of study.

Students of Professor Urs Gasser’s Spring 2018 Comparative Digital Privacy seminar hosted a symposium on 'Privacy by Design,' convening experts from government, private practice, industry, and academia to weigh in on all things privacy-related, from the difficulty of defining privacy to a comparison of the regulatory regimes in the United States and the European Union.

On April 20, Harvard Law School will host the third and final major event in its year-long program celebrating 200 years of HLS. HLS in the Community will convene alumni, faculty, students, and staff to explore the extraordinary reach and impact of Harvard lawyers.

Vivek Krishnamurthy studies international issues in internet governance as a clinical instructor at Harvard Law School’s Cyber Law Clinic. He spoke with the Gazette about the legal implications of the breach for Facebook, the laxity in U.S. privacy protections, and how Facebook’s difficulties may mark the end of the tech industry’s long deregulation honeymoon in this country.

Last week, the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University launched AIandInclusion.org, a new website related to preventing bias in algorithms and ensuring that voices and perspectives from diverse populations help shape the future of artificial intelligence.

A panel of leading experts convened at Harvard Law School on Jan. 25 to explore the consequences of the Federal Communications Commission's recent Restoring Internet Freedom Order.

On Jan. 22, the Cyberlaw Clinic at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society released a multi-part Guide to Protest Art, a series aimed at educating people across the political spectrum who are using art to engage in civic dialogue.

The Berkman Klein Center's Cyberlaw Clinic, which provides pro-bono legal services to clients on issues relating to the internet, technology and intellectual property, has written in support of a number of technology cases in recent weeks.

Managing Director of the Cyberlaw Clinic Professor Chris Bavitz discusses some of the concerns and opportunities of risk assessment tools for criminal justice reform efforts, and the Berkman Klein Center's work on Ethics and Governance of AI initiative in partnership with the MIT Media Lab.

Experts gathered at Harvard Law School on Oct. 10 to examine the potential for bias as our decision-making intelligence becomes ever more artificial at an event titled “Programing the Future of AI: Ethics, Governance, and Justice,” held at Wasserstein Hall as part of HUBweek, an annual citywide celebration of art, science, and technology.

Adrian Perkins ’18, student body president and a former U.S. military captain and company commander, reflects on his longtime interest in tech law.

In an interview with the Harvard Gazette, cybersecurity expert Bruce Schneier, a fellow with the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society and the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School, talked about government and corporate surveillance, and about what concerned users can do to protect their privacy.

Legal scholars from across the globe gathered at HLS in July for a two-day conference on law and development, the latest iteration of a series of conferences held periodically by a loose consortium of schools including Harvard Law School, the University of Geneva, Renmin University of China, and the University of Sydney, Australia.

The Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University today announced the incoming and returning fellows, faculty associates, affiliates, and directors who together will form the core of the Center’s networked community in the 2017-2018 academic year.

The concept of speech is typically defined as the communication of thoughts in spoken words. Yet the authors note that First Amendment protection of speech is far broader, covering nonrepresentational art, instrumental music, and even nonsense—individual topics that Tushnet, Chen, and Blocher focus on (in that order) in the book.

Ellora Thadaney Israni ’19 was among 30 recipients selected to receive the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans, the premier graduate school fellowship for immigrants and children of immigrants.

When David Webb ’17 was approached with the opportunity to become a part-owner of Hiatus—an app that can scan users’ accounts to uncover auto-renewing charges that they may be unaware of—lessons from classes such as Consumer Contracts and Law, Economics, and Psychology, taught by Harvard Law Professor Oren Bar-Gill, immediately sprang to mind.

Ruth Okediji, a leading scholar in international intellectual property law and global economic regulation, will join the faculty of Harvard Law School as a tenured professor in July.

For the first time, Harvard Law School and the MIT Media Lab have collaborated to host an innovative January-term course, “Internet & Society: The Technologies and Politics of Control,” dedicated to understanding the legal and technical dynamics of the digital world.

During this year’s spring semester, Mark Tushnet, the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law, is teaching a novel seminar called “Diversity and Social Justice in First Year Classes.” It combines classroom teaching with an eight-part public lecture series examining how issues of diversity and social justice can be integrated into the core 1L classes.

Co-taught by HLS Professor Jeannie Suk Gersen and Nana Sarian, general counsel of Stella McCartney, “Fashion Law Lab,” a nine-day course offered at Harvard Law School during the January term, gave students the opportunity to role-play simulations of scenarios faced by general counsel working in the fashion industry.

On Jan. 5 President Barack Obama ’91 announced several key administration posts, including Jonathan Zittrain ’95 as appointee for member of the National Museum and Library Services Board (NMLSB).