Katherine Jo Strandburg

Courses

• Information Privacy Law

  Concerns about privacy – and the legal regulations that seek to address those concerns -- are increasingly prevalent in many aspects of social life. Privacy dilemmas are everywhere – in the home, the workplace, the marketplace, and in political life. Increasingly, privacy must be on the practicing lawyer’s standard menu of issues to spot. Privacy also frequently appears to be in tension with other important social values, such as freedom of speech, and crime prevention. This course introduces and surveys the legal framework pertaining to information privacy in the United States, including constitutional, statutory and common law, as it applies to various sectors of society. Topics include the concept of privacy, privacy and the media, financial privacy, privacy of electronic communications, identification and anonymization, and privacy as related to targeted advertising and location tracking.

• Innovation Law and Economics

  This course will provide an overview of economic approaches to the analysis of intellectual property law. We will begin by discussing traditional economic approaches to IP theory. Emerging phenomena such as user communities on the Internet, open source software, and creativity in the absence of IP protection have cast doubt on whether traditional economic theories of the IP system fully capture important aspects of innovation economics. We will therefore broaden our horizons by reviewing theoretical approaches to IP that attempt to incorporate factors such as intrinsic motivation, behavioral biases, social norms, and institutional aspects into the theory. We will discuss whether and in what ways current findings in economics, psychology and other social sciences should lead us to recalibrate the IP system. We will also consider economic instruments for rewarding innovators outside the IP system, such as prizes. Examples will come from patent, copyright, trademark and design protection, in both the online and the offline world.

• Innovation Policy Colloquium

  In the Colloquium this year, we will use the issues that arose in the COVID pandemic to examine innovation in the health care field. We will consider such matters as the relationship between intellectual property, encouraging medical advances, and assuring appropriate public access to these advances. We will also examine the special problem of developing countries; the effects of international obligations such as the TRIPS Agreement, and competition issues related to innovation and intellectual property. The Colloquium has two components. In one, leading thinkers are invited to present recent work. In the other, we read background materials relevant to each speaker's presentation. The Colloquium also provides each student with the opportunity to write and present an independent research paper.

• Patent Law

  This course focuses on the substantive law governing the acquisition and enforcement of patent rights in light of conflicting and historical views toward the ownership of information. The statutory requirements for patentability are examined under both the 1952 Patent Act (still in force for older patents) and the America Invents Act (which applies to patent applications filed after March 2013). We discuss the extent to which these rules respond to the nature of innovative activity and then go on to consider issues at the enforcement stage: claim interpretation, claim scope, and defenses to infringement. We also examine the relationship between patent rights, antitrust law, and other incentives to innovate. This year, we will aso evaluate the system in light of the efforts to find diagnostics, treatments, and vaccines for Covid-19 and ensure their equitable distribution.

  Hybrid Teaching Notes

  In this co-taught course, one of the faculty members will teach from the classroom to a mix of in-person and remote students for approximately half of the class meetings.  For the other class meetings, taught by the other faculty member, the class will be convened entirely remotely.

• Survey of Intellectual Property

  A survey of federal laws of copyright, patent, and trademark and related state doctrines of unfair competition, trade secrets, common law copyright, and the right of publicity. The course addresses fascinating and important questions about the best means to promote innovation and creativity in today's society. The basic grounding in intellectual property law provided by this course will be useful in nearly any commercial practice. Those who already plan to specialize in IP would probably be better served by registering for the separate courses in copyright, trademark, or patent law and are encouraged to consult with the instructor before registering for the survey. Students who have already taken patents, copyright, or trademark law also may wish to consult with the instructor as to whether the survey course is the most appropriate option.