Intellectual Property

A new report by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, "Holyoke: A Massachusetts Municipal Light Plant Seizes Internet Access Business Opportunities," documents the success of a municipally-owned electric utility in providing Internet access services.

In a lecture marking his appointment as George Bemis Professor of International Law at Harvard Law School, Jonathan Zittrain ’95 addressed the impact of algorithms on our lives—both on and offline—in a lecture titled “Love the Processor, Hate the Process: The Temptations of Clever Algorithms and When to Resist Them.”

The Harvard Law School CopyrightX course is part of a culture of experimentation in online learning that has marked HarvardX — the University’s portion of the collaborative MOOC provider platform known as edX — from the beginning: The course pioneered a parallel teaching model for online and on-campus students and, more recently, an additional hybrid model that combines online and in-person learning far from Harvard’s campus.

For law students interested in entrepreneurism and startups—as entrepreneurs themselves, as lawyers representing startups, or both—there is a wealth of growing and intersecting opportunities at Harvard Law School and across the university.

Internet Monitor, a research project based at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, recently published the project's second annual report, "Internet Monitor 2014: Reflections on the Digital World," a collection of roughly three dozen short contributions that highlight and discuss some of the most compelling events and trends in the digitally networked environment over the past year.

Last spring semester, Harvard Law School Professor and Berkman Center for Internet & Society Faculty Director William Fisher debuted CopyrightX, a free, online, noncredit course that explores copyright law. The course is being offered again this semester, improving on its unique format thanks to student feedback and data from last year.

Brown uses her own example—after leaving a law partnership upon the birth of her daughter, she is now a professor of business law—and those of many others, from a jewelry designer to a nurse to a rabbi, to show the possibilities for those who are unhappy with the practice of law. Such a change is not easy, but a lawyer’s skills can be reframed and refreshed, she says, adding that she has never met a former lawyer who regrets having left the profession.

The biennial Harvard Law School Conference on Intellectual Property Law attracted scores of IP lawyers, business people, academicians, and judges to the school April 12 to discuss recent developments in IP law.

CopyrightX, the new, experimental, Web-based Harvard Law School course which prioritizes the human dimension of online teaching, is the brainchild of Professor Terry Fisher, who is committed to what he calls the democratization of higher education.

Many Harvard Law School alumni have been extraordinarily successful, many have lived unusual lives, and not a few have done both—including Morgan Chu ’76, one of the most successful IP lawyers in the world, who, along with his wife, Helen, is endowing in perpetuity the dean’s chair at HLS. Dean Martha Minow will be honored as the inaugural Morgan and Helen Chu Dean’s Professor.

Harvard Law School’s first ever online course launched Monday, opening up “Copyright,” a class taught by Law School professor William W. Fisher, III, to hundreds of people worldwide. HLS1x: “Copyright,” which is offered through the Harvard branch of the online learning platform edX, is closely modeled after the Law School course taught by Fisher since 1994.

Is the International Criminal Court succeeding? According to Assistant Clinical Professor Alex Whiting, the answer is a tentative yes. Nevertheless, Whiting—who serves as the prosecution coordinator in the Office of the Prosecutor at the ICC—provided a candid portrait of the court’s strengths and weaknesses at a talk on Wednesday, Oct. 10, sponsored by the Harvard Law School Human Rights Program.

The highly connected nature of today’s world has all sorts of benefits—but all sorts of potential costs as well, from loss of control of private data to a world financial system so intertwined that when one part of it falls, it’s hard to keep other parts from toppling along with it. In “Interop: The Promise and Perils of Highly Interconnected Systems,” John Palfrey ’01 and Urs Gasser LL.M. ’03 draw on their work at the HLS Berkman Center for Internet & Society to start developing a “normative theory identifying what we want out of all this connectivity.”

The American Association of University Women recently awarded Sunshine Yin ’13 the Selected Professions Fellowship to support her work in the area of intellectual property law. The fellowship, which includes an $18,000 award, is given annually in areas where women’s participation has traditionally been low, such as law, medicine, architecture, engineering and mathematics.

Harvard Law School Professor William Alford ’77 recently appeared on the radio program ‘The Takeaway’ to discuss the future of U.S.-China relations, specifically with regard to trade and Chinese intellectual property law, which Alford describes as “a work in progress.”

According to John Palfrey, businesspeople are often insufficiently attentive to the ways that intellectual property rights can be acquired and exercised. His new book, “Intellectual Property Strategy” (MIT Press), is thus written with businesspeople in mind. Palfrey, Vice Dean for Library and Information Resources and Faculty Co-Director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, argues for leaders of businesses and non-profit organizations to adopt IP policies that go beyond the traditional, highly restrictive “sword and shield” approach, and that instead focus on flexibility and creativity.

Siddhartha Yog, M.B.A. ’04, founder and managing partner of The Xander Group Inc., an India-focused, emerging-markets investment firm, has given the University $11,000,001 to establish two new professorships, fellowships and financial aid, and an intellectual entrepreneurship fund.

In a recent review in the New Republic, HLS Professor Adrian Vermeule ’93 examines the book “Machiavellian Democracy” (Cambridge University Press, 2011) by John P. McCormick.

On Friday June 15th, HLS Professor Jeannie Suk ’02 testified before the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Intellectual Property, Competition and the Internet regarding the Innovative Design Protection and Piracy Prevention Act (IDPPPA).

In her long career as a law professor, Mary Ann Glendon has seen students struggle to stay idealistic in an imperfect world. Will they lose their moral compass if they choose a life in politics? Risk irrelevance if they stick to academia? Glendon, a former U.S. ambassador to the Vatican, has explored how great statespersons and philosophers grappled with similar questions.