2023 Intellectual Property Colloquium 

The IP Colloquium explores doctrinal, theoretical, and policy issues in intellectual property law. Its primary aim is to provide students with an opportunity to hone their critical and analytical skills through deep engagement with leading legal scholarship in IP.

The Colloquium exposes students to a broad array of interdisciplinary scholarship across the various branches of this expansive and increasingly important area of law, and it requires them to engage in both written and oral analysis and critique of that scholarship. The Colloquium centers on biweekly presentations by outside scholars who are nationally and internationally recognized in their fields.

This year’s speakers are:

Tim McFarlin | September 18, 2023

“COLD-CASE COPYRIGHT: THE SAGA OF MARK TWAIN AND MARY ANN CORD”

Tim McFarlin is an Associate Professor at Samford University - Cumberland School of Law, where he teaches courses on property and contracts, with a particular focus on copyright. In his scholarship, he has explored how the law intersects and interacts with the creative arts. He has written about the life, work and disputes of artists like Mark Twain, Chuck Berry, and Orson Welles, mining them for insights into copyright and the concept of authorship. He has also written on innovative online teaching methods, integrating collaborative reading and open-source materials into legal education.

Tim earned his Juris Doctor from St. Louis University School of Law and bachelor’s degrees in history and political science from the University of Missouri.

Camilla Hrdy | October 2, 2023

"Beyond Trade Secrecy: Confidentiality Agreements That Act Like Noncompetes" (with Christopher B. Seaman)

Professor Camilla A. Hrdy is Professor of Intellectual Property Law at University of Akron School of Law. She is a Visiting Scholar at the Engelberg Center on Innovation Law & Policy at NYU Law; an Affiliated Fellow at the Yale Law School Information Society Project; and a Scholar at the Center for Intellectual Property x Innovation Policy (C-IP2). She is also a member of the Sedona Conference Working Group on Trade Secrets.

Professor Hrdy’s primary teaching areas are Intellectual Property, Trade Secrets, Trademarks, Patents, and Civil Procedure. Professor Hrdy’s research focuses on intellectual property law; innovation and economic development; the history of patent law; intellectual property and federalism; the law and policy of trade secrets, trademarks, and unfair competition; and the relationship between intellectual property law, innovation, and human well-being.

Her articles have appeared or will appear shortly in various law journals, including Yale Law Journal, Stanford Law Review, Fordham Law Review, American Law Review, Boston College Law Review, Florida Law Review, Colorado Law Review, Wisconsin Law Review, Lewis & Clark Law Review, Berkeley Law & Technology Journal, and Michigan Technology Law Review.

She is a five-time recipient of the Thomas G. Byers Outstanding Faculty Publication Award at Akron Law.

She is a regular blogger on the IP scholarship blog, Written Description, where she writes on IP scholarship related to trade secrets, trademarks, patents, IP theory, the history of intellectual property in America, and numerous other topics.
 
Professor Hrdy holds a J.D. from Berkeley Law, a B.A. from Harvard University, and an M.Phil. in from the University of Cambridge, Department of History & Philosophy of Science. She received Harvard’s Hoopes prize, and a Redhead Prize from the University of Cambridge Department of History & Philosophy of Science.

Before coming to Akron Law, she was a resident fellow at the Yale Law School Information Society Project and a teaching fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Law School Center for Innovation, Technology & Competition.  

She clerked for U.S. District Judge Janis Graham Jack in the Southern District of Texas.  

Edward Lee | October 16, 2023

“PROMPTING PROGRESS: AUTHORSHIP IN THE AGE OF AI”

Professor Lee teaches international intellectual property law, copyright law, and trademark law at Chicago-Kent College of Law at Illinois Tech. He joined IIT Chicago-Kent's faculty in 2010 as a professor of law and director of the Program in Intellectual Property Law. He was a visiting faculty member at Chicago-Kent during the fall 2009 term from The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law, where he was a professor of law.

Professor Lee is a 1995 cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School, where he was an editor and co-chair of the books and commentaries office of the Harvard Law Review. In 1992, he graduated Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude from Williams College with a bachelor's degree in philosophy (highest honors) and classics.

Professor Lee's research focuses on the ways in which the Internet, technological development, and globalization challenge existing legal paradigms. His recent scholarship offers a new theory of decentralized IP (De-IP) to explain the ways in which creators are using NFTs. In 2023, Harper Business published Lee's book about NFTs, Creators Take Control, which explains how NFTs gave rise to a new market for digital and generative art. Lee's current research examines the ways in which AI disrupts copyright law. 

Previously, Professor Lee was a legal writing instructor at Stanford Law School and an attorney at Stanford's Center for Internet and Society, where he supervised students involved in public interest litigation related to law and technology and the Internet. From 1996 to 1999, Professor Lee was a litigation associate in the Washington, D.C., office of Mayer, Brown & Platt, working at all levels of trial and appellate litigation, including cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. Immediately following law school, he clerked for the Honorable John T. Noonan Jr. of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

S. Sean Tu | October 30, 2023

“WHY PHARMACEUTICAL PATENT THICKETS ARE UNIQUE” (WITH Michael A. Carrier)

Dr. Tu is a Professor of Law at West Virginia University and a Scholar at Georgetown University’s O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law. He holds degrees in chemistry and microbiology from the University of Florida and a J.D. from the University of Chicago, where he was a research assistant for Judge Richard Posner. Dr. Tu received his doctorate in pharmacology from Cornell University and completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the La Jolla Institute for Allergy and Immunology. He is a member of the Virginia and D.C. Bars and is also a registered Patent Attorney. Dr. Tu has extensive pharmaceutical patent prosecution and litigation experience and practiced at Foley & Lardner in Washington, DC in both the Chemical, Biotechnology & Pharmaceutical Practice and the Life Sciences and Nanotechnology Industry teams.

Dr. Tu is a legal scholar who focuses on Patent Prosecution and Patent Examiner / Applicant behaviors as well as the intersection between FDA and patent law. He is the co-author of three textbooks including the Fundamentals of United States Intellectual Property Law: Copyright, Patent and Trademark (2021); Biotechnology, Bioethics and the Law (2015); and Patent Law: An Open-Source Casebook (2021). He has also published numerous scientific and legal works including articles in Cell, Nature Cell Biology, the Stanford Technology Law Review, Florida Law Review, and the Duke Law and Technology Review.

Jennifer E. Rothman | November 13, 2023

“Postmortem Publicity Rights at the Property-Personality Divide”

Jennifer E. Rothman is the Nicholas F. Gallicchio Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School. She is nationally recognized for her scholarship in the field of intellectual property law.

She is the leading expert on the right of publicity and is frequently sought after to consult on legislation, high-profile litigation, and the development of creative projects. Rothman holds a secondary appointment at the Annenberg School for Communication.

In addition to focusing on conflicts between intellectual property rights and other constitutionally protected rights, such as the freedom of speech, her scholarship also explores the intersections of tort and property law, particularly in the context of the right of publicity, copyright, and trademark and unfair competition law. Her current research focuses on the ways intellectual property law is employed to turn people into a form of property, as well as how it regulates the production and content of expression.

Her recent book, The Right of Publicity: Privacy Reimagined for a Public World, published by Harvard University Press, addresses some of these concerns in what has been described as the “definitive biography of the right of publicity.” Rothman’s essays and articles regularly appear in top law reviews and journals. Her most recent article, “Navigating the Identity Thicket: Trademark’s Lost Theory of Personality, the Right of Publicity, and Preemption” appears in the Harvard Law Review.

She also created Rothman’s Roadmap to the Right of Publicity, an online resource, located at www.rightofpublicityroadmap.com, which provides a comprehensive analysis of state right of publicity laws and commentary on recent cases and legislation. Rothman is an elected member of the American Law Institute and an adviser on the Restatement of the Law (Third) of Torts: Defamation and Privacy.

Rothman joined the Penn faculty after serving as the William G. Coskran Chair at LMU Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, where she received the 2019-2020 David P. Leonard Faculty Service Award for outstanding teaching and service. Rothman was previously a member of the faculty at Washington University in St. Louis. She is also an affiliated fellow at the Yale Information Society Project at Yale Law School.

Rothman received her AB from Princeton University where she received the Asher Hinds Book Prize and the Grace May Tilton Prize. Rothman received an MFA in film production from the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts, where she directed an award-winning documentary. Rothman received her JD from UCLA, where she graduated first in her class and won the Jerry Pacht Memorial Constitutional Law Award for her scholarship in that field. Rothman served as law clerk to the Honorable Marsha S. Berzon of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco.

Rothman has also worked in the film industry, including a position in feature production at Paramount Pictures, and as an entertainment and intellectual property litigator in Los Angeles.

Saurabh Vishnubhakat | November 27, 2023

“Constitutional Structure in the Patent Office”

Saurabh Vishnubhakat is a Professor of Law and Director of the Intellectual Property and Information Law Program at Cardozo Law. He is also a Research Fellow at the Duke Law Center for Innovation Policy and a Senior Scholar at the George Mason University Center for IP and Innovation Policy.

Professor Vishnubhakat writes and teaches in intellectual property, administrative law and federal litigation, especially from an empirical perspective. His research explores the interaction of the U.S. intellectual property system with federal courts and agencies and with markets for technology. His work has been cited in federal judicial opinions, agency regulations, and over thirty appellate briefs in the Supreme Court and Federal Circuit.

Before joining Cardozo, Professor Vishnubhakat held joint appointments as a Professor of Law and Professor of Engineering at Texas A&M University. He began his career in the United States Patent and Trademark Office, serving as principal legal advisor to that agency’s first two chief economists. He was also a faculty fellow at Duke Law School, where he co-taught patent law, and was a postdoctoral associate at the Duke Center for Public Genomics, where he researched law and policy issues surrounding innovation in genetics and biomedicine.