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Volume Twenty-Four, Number 1, 2004
TABLE OF CONTENTS SYMPOSIA 2003 Stanford Law & Technology Association Conference: Ideas Without Boundaries: Creating and Protecting Intellectual Property in the International Arena International Challenges for the Pharmaceutical/Biotech Industries in the 21st Century The pharmaceutical and biotech industries are becoming increasingly reliant on each other. Drug companies are using the research tools and products developed by biotech companies to develop the new blockbuster drugs of tomorrow. Biotech, in turn, is becoming dependent on financing from the pharmaceutical industry to support its costly research and development programs. Today, globalization poses new legal, economic, social and political challenges for these interlinked industries, including how to balance global intellectual property protection with the need to bring essential drugs to impoverished nations at a reasonable cost and the international debate over what biotechnology innovations should be patentable. Keynote: The International Information Society For the first hundred years in the United States ' history, we protected no foreign copyrights at all. We were, in the modern parlance, born a pirate nation. In the context of patents, we have always had a tradition that respects the local reach of patent protection. But at this moment we are in a process of reforming that tradition. This tradition that has taught us the importance of a balanced system of protection, especially in the context of things like drug patents, has now been conceived of as an absolute right that should extend without qualification everywhere. Instead of manifesting what we as a profession know, that the reach of intellectual property protection needs to be conditioned depending upon the context, it expresses this ideal. And this system of balanced protection suffers. It is a failure that will increasingly weaken the ability for intellectual property protections to be respected around the world. In the context of Africa , thirty million people right now are infected with a disease which could be, to some important extent, treated—but is not. The claim that is asserted against the argument that drugs should be made available to these people is a claim increasingly framed in this rhetoric of theft. Twenty years from now it will seem extraordinary that a simple ideal about an abstract right, which if violated takes nothing from us and costs nothing to people whose rights were violated—it will seem extraordinary that this simple ideal stood in the way of stopping the death of ten to twenty-five million people. Copyright's Long Arm: Enforcing U.S. Copyrights Abroad U.S. content providers are facing increasingly complex jurisdictional issues as they attempt to protect their intellectual property in the global, online environment. This panel discussion focuses on the litigation surrounding Kazaa, a case that highlights these difficulties and tests our understanding of U.S. jurisdiction over foreign entities. As the Internet blurs global lines, differences in copyright protection will push the boundaries of U.S. law. At the same time, this development may raise troubling questions about the reach of U.S. copyright and the tactics that must be employed to locate, investigate, and halt alleged infringers based in other countries. Tracking Pirates in Cyberspace Companies are employing new surveillance and tracking techniques from hiring private investigation firms to watermarking to monitoring of peer-to-peer networks as they seek to prevent pirating of their intellectual property. These tactics are aimed at finding alleged cyber-infringers, wherever they may live in the real world. Content providers also are devising new policies about how to best stop infringement of their works, such as going after individual users rather than servers that enable file sharing. But such developments also threaten other key interests, such as privacy and free speech rights, and could lead ultimately to thwarting and preventing legal activity in the online environment
At the Crossroads of Law & Technology: Fourth Annual Conference, Patenting the Human Genome Quick, patent your genome. That's the message that a California man, Salvador Dolly, is spreading to everyone who will listen. And he should know. Unbeknownst to Dolly, a biotech company obtained a tissue sample and sequenced his DNA. After discovering that Dolly had a rare but natural genetic resistance to the HIV virus, the company patented Dolly's genome. To make matters worse, when Dolly began selling blood samples to medical researchers, the genetics company sued him for patent infringement. The case of NuGenEra, Inc. v. Dolly is fictitious, but nonetheless generated a judicial opinion and made the headlines. It is now on appeal before a fictitious United States Supreme Court comprised of Ninth Circuit Justices Alex Kozinski and Judge Kim M. Wardlaw and California Supreme Court Justice Ming W. Chin. This is a transcript of the oral argument heard before that court. Slip Opinion in the Matter of Salvador Dolly V. Nugenera, Inc. ARTICLE The collective bargaining agreement between all Major League Baseball players and clubs, the Major League Baseball Basic Agreement, includes among its prohibited activities certain acts of collusion between clubs. This provision, called the "collusion clause," fails to specifically define conduct exemplifying "collusion" under the Basic Agreement. Over the last two decades, clubs have been confronted with labor grievances alleging violations of the collusion clause. The complaints allege violations of the collusion clause attributed to an increase in free agent player supply coupled with declines in the market price of free agent players. This Article analyzes previous holdings by arbitration panels in collusion grievances and their interpretations of the collusion clause. Examining the particular facts surrounding the 2002-03 off-season, this Article concludes that some Major League clubs may have violated the collusion clause of the Basic Agreement. COMMENT The question of an exclusive licensee's ability to sublicense a copyright in absence of the licensor's permission has been a hotly debated topic, resulting in a split among circuit courts. The controversy stems from inconsistencies in historical definitions of exclusive licensing, ambiguity in relevant copyright provisions, and added complexities of recent technology. This Comment discusses how recent cases decided in prevalent entertainment circuits have seemingly settled the dispute, voicing a preference to retain certain rights in the licensor to guide the use of the copyright. The author supports this recent trend, but suggests an alternative approach for courts to apply, should the current interpretation prove to be unwieldy as licensed material becomes more diverse and complex. |
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