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, right? 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. And now, we're in the information age. We don't build as 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. And so for that reason, intellectual property rights because there are increasing component of what we are doing in the both the United States, and increasingly the entire world. It is a critical thing to understand to understand the policy surrounding our economy. It's also at 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 of another an intellectual property company. This is not just limited to things like our movie studios, or Google, or those sorts of things. Even companies as old and venerable as 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 are doing. And so IP is really at the core of what we do in the United States now. The other things that's really interesting about intellectual property law is it is in some ways what I call the plate tectonics, right? So plate tectonics is this study of the way that the earth moves that the major plates on the earth moves and 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, right? For example, in a patent context, you have an 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 we think about patents, on the underlying theories of patents, because it used to be 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 everyday 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 is 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. And 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, and to go a fairly limited set of movie theaters that were fairly, highly controlled by movie studios. And 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 are the way that we interact with television. Again, copyright plays a huge role in how that all works out. And now of course, we're in the YouTube area was 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, right? So the music of the big band era gave way to albums that people would produce and share. Then there were file sharing from firms and software like Napster and others, Grokster. And now onto 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 megabrand, right? And 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 megabrands 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 trademark was sort of associated with it. The other thing that's going on in 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, LLB on them or other clothing products. You're seen strollers carrying the logos of a clothing line. 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? And it's causing a great deal of controversy, debate and is a really interesting area to study.
