The Center for the Law of Intellectual Property and Technology (CLIPT) was founded in to promote research, education and legal practice in three intertwined areas of law. One aspect of CLIPT’s focus is intellectual property law, including copyright law, patent law, trade secret law and trademark law. These areas of law support the discovery of new inventions, the production of new creative works and the generation of new products, services and businesses.
The second facet of CLIPT’s focus is to examine and publicize legal issues stemming from the use of cutting-edge technologies. These issues often cut across multiple areas of law. For example, issues related to DNA are important in criminal law, property law, privacy law and patent law. Finally, CLIPT supports the use of technology to understand the law through endeavors such as the Supreme Court Mapping Project.
On Sept. 20, 2019, the UB School of Law and Womble Bond Dickinson LLP presented "Slanted Justice: Free Speech and Trademark law at the Supreme Court," an evening of discussion and acoustic music with Simon Tam, front man of The Slants. The Slants are an Asian-American dance-rock band founded to challenge racial stereotypes and named to defang a derogatory epithet.
Ironically, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office refused to trademark the band's name, declaring it a disparaging term for people of Asian-American descent. The resulting lawsuit went all the way to the Supreme Court, which Tam and the band won in a unanimous free-speech decision. This year Tam recounted the story in his memoir, Slanted: How an Asian American Troublemaker Took on the Supreme Court .
Announcements
-
Read an Alumni Roundtable on Cybersecurity Law in the 2019 issue of Baltimore Law
Cybersecurity and data privacy are becoming increasingly important issues in the law, as governments around the world grapple with regulations to protect individual privacy and manage data breaches. These laws will continue to define how businesses collect and use consumer data, and their obligations to protect this data from misuse, theft or exposure to unauthorized parties. Read the article.
CLIPT Launches Partnership with the Intellectual Property Center at the University of Szeged
CLIPT and the Intellectual Property Center at the University of Szegedz in Szeged, Hungary, are pleased to establish a new international partnership and affiliation.
The centers recognize that the private and public effects of intellectual property often transcend national borders. In today’s highly integrated global economy, many private companies seek to obtain and enforce related intellectual property rights in multiple countries, so that students, lawyers, and scholars must grapple with issues of international and comparative law to understand the effects of intellectual property rights on the business strategies. Moreover, the macroeconomic and humanitarian effects of intellectual property in a global and digital marketplace are complex. While IP rights can promote both progress and healthy competition, improperly calibrated protection may do more harm than good. In some cases, intellectual property could problematically limit the availability of goods and services in some parts of the world.
As a result of the inherently international nature of IP rights, understanding the ramifications of IP rights in multiple countries is a vital to the effective analysis of IP law. The new partnership is therefore intended to support both the pedagogical and scholarly goals of the centers by providing opportunities for enhanced collaboration. As the relationships between the centers grows, we hope to support the exchange of both students and faculty members and to encourage scholarly interaction among researchers.