So why should you learn about intellectual property? Well, I think there's many reasons, but I'll talk about a few here. So the first thing is that intellectual property rights are critical to our national industrial policy. By that I mean, IP is sort of what we do now. We have gone from the industrial age, where we built huge machines, factories, things that came out of these factories were sort of the backbone, the core of the economy. Now, we're in the information age. We don't build these many things anymore, and in fact, what we do is create new ideas, new technologies, new things sure. But those things are less dependent on manufacturing and tangible objects and much more based on the ideas, and the intellectual content based within them. So for that reason, intellectual property rights, because they're in increasing component of what we are doing in both the United States and increasingly the entire world, it is a critical thing to understand the policy surrounding our economy. It's also with the core of the modern US economy. The major brands that we think of, the major technologies, the major companies in the US right now are all in one way or another an intellectual property company. This is not just limited to things like movie studios or Google or those sorts of things. Even companies as old and venerable is Coca-Cola, Walmart, Amazon.com, those sorts of things that you would ordinarily think of as fairly, direct, traditional sorts of companies, they sell things, of course, they are still an intellectual property company. They do an enormous amount of work surrounding IP rights, whether it be patents, copyrights, trademarks, all of those things are right at the core of what they're doing. So IP is really at the core of what we do in the United States now. The other thing that's really interesting about intellectual property law is, it is in some ways what I call the plate tectonics. So plate tectonics is this study of the way that the Earth moves. That the major plates on the earth move, and they inevitably bump up against each other and cause disruptions. That's exactly the same as what's going on in the economy where IP is involved. You have, for example, in the patent context. You have a area of law that covers things like chemicals and pharmaceuticals, electronics, and biology, and increasingly genetics, and at the same time software, and even now business and finance is being covered by patents, and patents are being used more and more. What this is doing is putting an enormous amount of stress on the law of patents. On the way that we think about patents. On the underlying theories of patents. Because it used to be that you would think of a patent, and a patent would be related to a particular product, say a pharmaceutical drug or maybe a new type of machine or even just an electronic device would be related to that patent. That's really not the way we think about patents anymore as they become spread out through the economy. Patents are both covering more things and the products that we use every day have more patentable inventions embedded within them. Current iPhones have hundreds and hundreds of patentable inventions embedded within them. Everything that you're buying now, even something as simple as a kitchen mixer, for example, has an enormous amount of patentable inventions. Your banking you're doing, all is related to patents. There are new algorithms that are evaluating people for your credit score or for your ability to buy and sell stocks. All of those things are patentable and related to patents, and patents are playing an increasing role. What this is doing is putting an enormous amount of stress on the patent law. How can this law that was developed in the late 1700s, keep up with the pace of technological change and even more importantly, economic change. So we're seeing lots of stress about that. Copyright, we're seeing very similar sorts of things. In the music and TV realm. It used to be that in order to see an audio visual work, a movie, for example, you had to go to a movie theater, you had to go to a fairly limited set of movie theaters that were fairly highly controlled by movie studios. Then of course, we have the advent of broadcast television. Again, it was different, it changed the economy, it changed the way we thought about this type of work, but it was still fairly limited. Then came things like the TiVo or the DVR box changes the way that we interact with television. Again, copywrite plays a huge role in how that all works out. Now of course, we're in the YouTube area, where streaming Video becoming the norm. All of this is the way that copyright has helped shape the economy and vice versa. Music has seen a very similar set of challenges. So the music of the Big Band era gave way to albums that people would produce and ship. Then there was file-sharing from firms and software like Napster, and others, Grokster and now on to sort of streaming music, Apple music, and even downloadable music. All of these things have changed the way we interact with music, and at each step of the way, copyright has played an important role, and often, an extremely controversial role. Trademarks. One of the most important things that's been happening in trademarks is the emergence of a global mega brand. So companies like Starbucks, Burger King, Coca-Cola, all of those have become unbelievably large, primarily on the basis of their trademark, much more so than anything in particular that they are selling. They're selling essentially a look and feel, they're selling an association with a particular lifestyle or a particular brand. These global mega brands are changing the way that we think of trademarks. Because the trademark is now becoming the primary asset rather than the way we used to think about it, which is the thing that was being sold was the asset and the trademark was sort of associated with it. The other thing that's going on and trademarks that's causing a lot of controversy is that as trademarks gets stronger, as they emerge as more important assets, you're seeing trademarks becoming the products. You're seeing branded cars that have, for example, L.L.Bean on them or other clothing products. You're seeing strollers carrying the logos of clothing lines. You're seeing a lot of crossover. You're seeing movies made, apparently just to generate trademark merchandising. All of those things are changing, again, the way that we think about trademarks, and the question is, can this law keep up? Is the law keeping up? It's causing a great deal of controversy, debate, and is a really interesting area to study.
