Welcome to Innovation Law! This seminar class will culminate in you writing a paper on a topic of your choice related to innovation and the law. The class will be divided into four parts: a brief introduction or refresh on intellectual property law basics to frame our discussions, a few weeks reviewing hot topics in innovation law and policy (e.g., how IP law affects incentives to innovate, how these laws have different effects in different industries, and how non-IP laws and ethics also affect innovation and creativity), a few weeks with guest speakers discussing topics of interest to students (see below request to tell me what you’d like to talk about), and the last weeks will be student presentations of their papers. Along the way, we will check in with drafts of your paper progress.

For the first week of class, please read the following. Some of these will be discussed in the second session, as well.

Pages 30-37 (I.B., Overview of Intellectual Property) in Intellectual Property in the New Technological Age
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5344140 (This is the same reading from the first day of Copyright Patent Trademark, so if you just took that class, refresh your memory)

Kevin Rivette & Henry Nothhalf, & David Kline, Discovering New Value in Intellectual Property, https://hbr.org/2000/01/discovering-new-value-in-intellectual-property (~10 pages)

Eryn Brown, Do patents invent innovation?
https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/society/2018/do-patents-in… (~5 pages)

Watch “Role of IP when making investment decisions” from Columbia Tech Ventures https://player.vimeo.com/video/140664614 (5 minutes)

Darrell M. West, Technology and the Innovation Economy, https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/1019_technology_in…
(12 pages)

I'd love to hear from you what you most want to cover this semester related to innovation law and your favorite ways of learning. Please email me (c.j.laser@csuohio.edu) with some ideas of your favorite topics to explore, e.g., tax policy, medical and pharmaceuticals, race & gender and IP law, AI, cyborgs, Taylor Swift, etc.