Intellectual Property Professor Tonya M. Evans was selected to present her work-in-progress, Sampling Patent to Remix Copyright (aka Reverse Engineering Copyright), at 11th Annual Intellectual Property Scholars Conference. The conference is hosted this year at DePaul University College of Law Center for Intellectual Property Law & Information Technology (CIPLIT). The Conference is a joint effort of CIPLIT and the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology, Boalt Hall School of Law; the Intellectual Property Law Program, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University; and the Stanford Program in Law, Science and Technology, Stanford Law School.
Professor Evans’ paper explores further the general arguments and assumptions presented in her latest article Sampling, Looping and Mashing … Oh My!: How Hip Hop Scratched More Than the Surface of Intellectual Property Law, 21 Fordham Intell. Prop. Media & Ent. L.J. 843 (2011). In her current work, she asserts that copyright reform initiatives should “sample” (that is, borrow from) patent policies to “remix” (that is, inform and reform) copyright jurisprudence. More specifically, copyright law must be reformulated to achieve an optimal balance between a copyright holder’s exclusive rights and the legal “space” a second generation creator needs to build upon existing works to create new ones. This, she argues, is essential for collaborative and cumulative creative genres like performance and visual arts.
The IP Scholars Conference brings together intellectual property scholars from across the country and the world to present their works-in-progress in order to benefit from the critique of colleagues. The Conference includes both plenary and “break out” sessions on all IP-related topics, including but not limited to Copyright, Trademark and Unfair Competition Law, Patent, Trade Secret and Cyberlaw.
A list of presentations and more information about IPSC and CIPLIT is available at: http://www.ipscholars.org/