INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY AND
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY AND
Few information policy topics have generated as much heated debate in recent years as intellectual property policy as applied to digital networked environments. The contention largely derives from the dissolution of a long-standing status quo in which the rights of authors, publishers, and consumers of information products and services were in a relative equilibrium.
There are a number of ways to recalibrate an equilibrium among these affected parties and to reconceptualize the role of intellectual property law in the new information economy. One is by building rights management into digital documents and let "lex informatica" become the predominant paradigm for information access and use. Another is to leave to the market, and to licensing practices that will arise there, the quest for a satisfactory allocation of rights among these parties. While some will applaud these strategies because they would largely supplant intellectual property law, others seek to reconstruct a balanced and workable intellectual property law for the information age.
Although I expect technology and licenses to protect intellectual property in the information age, I also see value in reconstructing intellectual property policy as a component of information policy more generally. To do this well, a broad-based effort will be needed to articulate a social theory for the information society in which we'd like to live. My talk will offer some thoughts on how this might be achieved.
Pamela Samuelson is a Professor at the University of California at Berkely with a joint appointment in the School of Information Management & Systems and in the School of Law. She was a faculty member (1981 - 1986) of the University of Pittsburgh Law School, from which she visited at Columbia, Cornell, and Emory law schools. Her principal area of expertise is intellectual property law. Samuelson has written and spoken extensively about the changes that new information technologies pose for the legal regimes. As a Contributing Editor of Communications of the ACM, a monthly computing professional journal, she writes a regular "Legally Speaking" column. A Fellow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and of the Cyberspace Law Institute, she also serves on the LEXIS-NEXIS Electronic Publishing Advisory Board and on the editorial board for the Electronic Information Law & Policy Report. She is a 1976 graduate of Yale Law School, and had practiced as associate with Wilkie Farr & Gallagher in New York. In June of 1997 she was named a Fellow of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
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