Welcome
Dear Friends of the Stanford Program in Law, Science & Technology:
Welcome to this issue of LST@Stanford.
The entire Stanford community mourns the passing of Professor John Barton, a pioneer in the study of law, science and technology. John, the George E. Osborne Professor of Law, Emeritus, passed away on August 3, 2009 from injuries suffered in a bicycle accident. Although John retired from full-time teaching in 2002, he remained an active member of our program, with a particularly strong focus on vaccines and drugs for the developing world. John will be greatly missed. For more information on this great man's life, see the eulogy by Professor Hank Greely
on the blog of our Center for Law and the Biosciences, and view a video recording of the Memorial Service
held for him at Stanford Law School on November 10, 2009. A memorial fund in honor of Professor Barton has been established at Stanford Law School. For more information, please click here.
This issue of LST@Stanford features an interview with Professor Michael Wara, in which he discusses current issues surrounding carbon credits with LST@Stanford contributor Yin-Chen Phang.
The newsletter also provides detailed activity updates from our Law, Science and Technology constituent centers and an introduction to its prolific fellows. In addition you will find an overview of recent and upcoming events organized and sponsored by the Stanford Program in Law, Science and Technology.
We are aided greatly in our work by the support of our LST Venture Circle affiliates (Apple, Inc., Cisco, Cornerstone Research, Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, Fenwick & West, Google, Inc., Intel Corporation, Microsoft Corporation, Oracle, Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe, Qualcomm, SAP and Winston & Strawn), our LST Partners (Cooley Godward Kronish, Genentech, Ropes & Gray, Skadden Arps Slate Meagher & Flom, White & Case, and Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale & Dorr) and our LST Associates (Gilead Sciences, Inc., Greenberg Traurig, and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati). Our affiliates’ generous support places the LST Program on a much stronger footing to carry on its exciting work.
There are too many exciting things happening across the Stanford Program in Law, Science and Technology to cover them all comprehensively within this newsletter. However, I hope that you will find this overview useful and that it may motivate you to become involved in our activities. Further information can always be found on our website at http://lst.stanford.edu, where you may also sign up for our mailing list.
I wish you an inspired reading. Thank you very much for your support of the Stanford Law School Program in Law, Science & Technology.
Sincerely,
Roland Vogl
Executive Director
The Stanford Program in Law, Science & Technology
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Interview Spotlight
Carbon Credits and the Evolving Landscape of Cleantech: An Interview with Professor Michael Wara
In January 2009, Stanford launched a $100M energy institute for cleantech research and teaching, named the Precourt Institute for Energy. The new facility will support the activities of the existing Global Climate and Energy Project (GCEP) on campus. Among the ideas generated for cleantech research are nanoscience applications, solar cells, conversion of solar energy into liquid fuel, wind-mechanism energy generation, and large-scale carbon dioxide sequestration for coal-burning operations.
Professor Michael Wara is a member of the faculty at Stanford Law School. Previously, he worked as an associate at Holland and Knight, LLP. Wara’s current research focuses on the emerging global market for greenhouse gases and the Post-Kyoto regime for reducing their emissions. We talked to Professor Wara about carbon credits, the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) and his view on the future of cleantech and environmental regulations.
How did your background prompt your interest in this area of research?
I have a PhD in Ocean Science. My research was focused on climate, so I worked on areas related to natural variation in climate and how different parts of the planet system interact with each other. I ultimately decided, however, that policy issues were more interesting to me than the science aspects. I began studying science and law policy four to five years ago, particularly the development of carbon markets, which has become the focus of my research. I want to understand how these markets actually perform in practice, and if they accomplish their financial objectives. If they do not, then I want to understand how we can fix them without harming the related markets. I have been at Stanford for around a year as a law professor, and for a year before that as a research professor, but I've also written in this area as a law student and in practice.
What are your concerns regarding the practical reality of environmental regulations in cleantech?
I am particularly interested in working on the practical reality of these new evolving cleantech institutions – how they operate, their governing regulations, how to create fair exchanges in the carbon market, and the placement of legal frameworks for the whole operation. Since we are dealing with carbon dioxide – a colorless, odorless gas – and the rights to emit this gas, this is a unique commodity. As a commodity it is basically a creation of law, as opposed to normal commodities like a barrel of oil or a bushel of corn. This creates an evolving interrelationship between traditional environmental regulation and technological innovation that breeds many policy and legal framework issues.
An example in theory is building a wind farm in China – for example, in Inner Mongolia. The wind farm displaces coal fire power, creating a carbon difference that is used to generate carbon credits, which can be traded. It is the hope that the cash flow from these carbon credits will motivate developers to tap into this additional source of revenue, simultaneously encouraging cleaner and newer technology innovation. This type of incentive is around four to five years old, and yet growth has been so swift that the scale of the issue keeps changing, so that it is constantly a new species of phenomenon.
Europe's active cap and trade system, which the U.S. is considering implementing, encourages big power companies to cancel their coal projects, except for the ones that capture carbon. They built other types of power plants – solar, natural gas, etc., changing the technology choices made and reshaping the incentives to invest in research and development in different technologies. Venture capitalists in the Silicon Valley are now increasingly excited about investing in competitive technologies that do not emit carbon and can be substitutes for coal energy. The capital costs of entering this market are very high, however, and all this is really changing the interrelationships between traditional environmental regulation and technological innovation, as motivators and limitations on each other.
What is the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), and how is its efficacy affected by the pressures and balances of credit buyers, sellers, and environmental regulators?
The CDM is an international system for creating, buying, and selling carbon offsets. Carbon offsets are the certified "non-existence" of an emission of carbon dioxide – essentially a statement from a regulatory body that a certain amount of carbon dioxide (corresponding to the credit) was not emitted.
This motivates power plant investors to build more environmentally-sound power plants in substitution of coal power plants, so they can sell carbon offsets in addition to power. In practice, it turns out to be very difficult to verify carbon offset claims with a high degree of confidence. This is largely due to the significant amount of political pressure to sign off on power plant projects. Project developers want profit, and buyers of credits want credits to buy – creating a twofold pressure system for signing off these power plants. This is different from other economic situations where buyers have some incentives to monitor quality or to monitor sellers in the market – the commodity of interest is the carbon credit, and not the environmental concern, per se. A lot of credits issued or created do not actually represent a change in behavior or a reduction in emissions.
Another problem arises when the power plant is built in a foreign location, where it can be difficult to accurately assess the economic conditions. With smart and convincing consultants and little other sources of information about the projects, it can be very difficult to accurately assess the true efficacy of the system in environmental terms.
There are two main issues that need to be considered: the environmental interests of pollution control and the technology innovation problem. The changing landscape in this field involves how these two factors interact to create a price for carbon that motivates a stimulating market for big energy companies to invest in research and development in this arena.
How will this affect environmental regulation?
The production and selling of energy in this country has been a significant sector of the economy. What is exciting is that we are introducing the possibility for rapid technological change into the environmental regulatory system. I think it's as exciting as what has happened in high tech or biotech industries over the last 30 years. In terms of capital formation in this country and globally, it will become potentially more significant. The capital that is currently deployed to build new power plants is truly enormous, and the future capital needs will be even higher, as we designate capital especially to help countries like China and India in the next few decades. If we can develop new laws to help these technologies get a share of that potentially enormous capital market, this can possibly have tremendous environmental benefits locally and internationally as well.
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FAIR USE PROJECT
The Fair Use Project (along with colleagues from Georgetown and the University of California) submitted an amicus brief in Salinger v. Colting on behalf of the American Library Association, the Association of Research Libraries, the Association of College and Research Libraries, The Organization for Transformative Works and the Right to Write Fund, explaining the errors the Fair Use Project believes the District Court made in issuing an injunction prohibiting the U.S. publication of 60 Years Later - Coming Through The Rye on the ground it represented a likely infringement of JD Salinger's copyrights in Catcher In The Rye
. http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/node/6230
A second amicus brief was filed in Gaylord v. US, a fair use case currently on appeal in the Federal Circuit. We filed it on behalf of the Andy Warhol Foundation, and several other amici, including the Warhol Museum, contemporary artists Barbara Kruger, Thomas Lawson, Jonathan Monk, and Allen Ruppersberg, and a variety of law professors who care about the extent to which copyright promotes and protects free expression. The issue surrounds a stamp and the fair use of a statue that appears in it. The Postal Service got permission to use the photograph that appears on the stamp, but not the column depicted in it, so the sculptor sued the Postal Service for infringing his copyrights in the sculpture. The Fair Use Project submitted an amicus brief because it thought the Federal Circuit should hear the views of those who create, promote and defend that art.
http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/node/6223
Anthony Falzone, Executive Director, Fair Use Project; Lecturer in Law, Stanford Law School
Julie Ahrens, Associate Director, Fair Use Project
CONSUMER PRIVACY PROJECT
The Consumer Privacy Project (CPP) assisted the consumer watchdog group Patient Privacy Rights in drafting comments to the Federal Trade Commission on a proposed interim rule regarding the necessity of alerting consumers of unauthorized exposure of electronic health information. The FTC referred to PPR’s comments repeatedly in its Report & Order. http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/node/6195
The CPP completed an alpha of WhatApp.org, a website that reviews online and mobile apps for privacy and data security. The CPP expects a public beta in the Spring. Funding for the project comes from a consumer privacy grant from the Rose Foundation. http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/node/6181
Fellow M. Ryan Calo is publishing an article tentatively entitled "People Can Be So Fake: A New Dimension To Privacy And Technology." The article makes the case that technology and interface design are evolving in ways that implicate privacy without necessarily collecting or processing information. http://ssrn.com/abstract=1458637
CIS Fellows
M. Ryan Calo, Residential Fellow
Prior to joining Stanford Law School in 2008, Ryan was an associate at Covington & Burling, LLP, where he advised companies on issues of data security, privacy, and telecommunication. He researches and presents on the intersection of law and technology. Ryan appears regularly in the media to discuss technology, including recently NPR, KCBS Morning News, ABCNews.com, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Portland Herald Press, Best Life Magazine, the San Jose Democrat, and the Christian Science Monitor. Ryan holds a BA from Dartmouth College and a JD from the University of Michigan Law School.
Sarah Hinchliff Pearson, Residential Fellow
Sarah joined the Center’s Fair Use Project in February as a residential fellow. Prior to joining CIS, she worked as an intellectual property associate at Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson LLP in New York City. Sarah graduated cum laude from the University of Michigan Law School in 2006. Before law school, Sarah received her undergraduate degree from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University and worked at a number of media outlets. In addition to her work for the Fair Use Project, Sarah researches and writes about the effect of technology on traditional media institutions and the content they produce.
Alex Feerst, Residential Fellow
Alex Feerst joined the Fair Use Project in September as a residential fellow. He holds undergraduate and law degrees from Columbia University and a doctorate in English from Duke University. Before law school, he taught American literature and literary theory at Macalester College.
For more information about the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, please visit http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu.
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CodeX is in the process of organizing PRIVACY 2010, a symposium on intelligent information privacy management, which will take place March 23-25, 2010. Please see the Events section of the newsletter for more information, or visit the CodeX website.
CodeX Fellows
The Center is excited to host Professor Mary-Anne Williams of the University of Sydney until January 2010. We also welcome two new non-residential fellows, Eran Kahana and Michael Poulshock.
Professor Mary-Anne Williams, Visiting Fellow
Professor Mary-Anne Williams has a Master of Laws and a PhD in Computer Science. She holds a Research Chair at the University of Technology in Sydney and is Director of the Innovation and Enterprise Research Laboratory. Mary-Anne is a leading authority on innovation, cognitive models, decision-making, collaboration, and business strategy, having published widely and served on high-profile editorial and advisory boards. Her current research interests focus on the fusion of law and advanced technologies, from robots to smart phones and collaborative software to mobile services.
Mary-Anne is a Visiting Fellow at CodeX until January 2010. During her stay, Mary-Anne will be working with other members of CodeX on progress initiatives in privacy management, legal informatics and IP Law (CodeX investigates mechanisms for harnessing and embedding computational problem solving power in legal applications and services).
Mary-Anne is co-organizing PRIVACY 2010, a transdisciplinary symposium on Intelligent Privacy Management, along with Roland Vogl and Michael Genesereth.
Giuseppe Contissa, Residential Fellow
Giuseppe Contissa received his primary law degree and his doctoral degree in Legal Informatics from the University of Bologna, where he worked as a researcher and lecturer for several years. He authored numerous articles in the realm of artificial intelligence and law, focusing his research on computable models of law, legal knowledge representation and development of legal ontologies, software agents, theory of law, legislative drafting and legimatics. As a CodeX Fellow, Giuseppe works on the Stanford Intellectual Property Exchange project (SIPX)
. The project aims to develop an advanced online marketplace for content. The system will support full license negotiation and customization, in order to minimize legal transaction costs.
Eran Kahana, Non-residential Fellow
Eran Kahana is senior corporate counsel and chair of intellectual property at DataCard Corporation. His main areas of practice are e-commerce, intellectual property, complex international commercial agreements and patent prosecution. Eran frequently speaks about issues such as e-commerce, IP licensing, general contract law, privacy and security and has authored a number of articles in those areas.
As a CodeX Fellow, Eran works on his “autonomous intelligent cyber entity” (AiCE) project which explores the wide range of legal and commercial issues surrounding the use of autonomous intelligent cyber entities in computational law settings. A central theme in this project leverages the “corporate-entity” paradigm as the building block for AiCE. It argues that the theory of endowing an “entity” status on artificial creations (i.e., corporations) can be used to endow AiCE with a similar legal status. The research then delves deep into the challenges, benefits and consequences of doing so. It argues for the need of a legal framework to support this action, introducing the “Uniform AiCE Commercial Transactions Act (UACTA)” as one of the key legal structures for governing AiCE computational law transactions.
Michael Poulshock, Non-residential Fellow
Michael is a Policy Automation Consultant at Oracle, where he develops legal decision systems and trains clients in modeling legislation, regulations, and policy using business rules. He is also the creator of Jureeka.org, a web-based platform that seeks to expand public access to law by allowing legal specialists to automate their knowledge. He previously represented human rights victims in Alien Tort Statute claims, in cooperation with the Center for Constitutional Rights. He was also an Assistant Deputy Public Advocate for the state of New Jersey and a field coordinator in Kosovo for the American Friends Service Committee.
Michael’s Jureeka.org project is an open, web-based platform that seeks to expand public access to legal information by allowing specialists to automate their knowledge. It allows lawyers, law students, and other subject matter experts to represent their knowledge as if-then rules. Jureeka then uses the rules to generate interviews, which present the relevant topic in a digestible manner. The system lets the public squeeze answers out of complicated legal source material in a simple way. As a repository of legal expertise, Jureeka lets specialists work collaboratively to develop knowledge bases rapidly in a wiki-like fashion. As a public interest project, Jureeka is designed to address the lack of freely available, practical legal modeling tools and hopes to encourage the proliferation of computational legal systems and embedded legal knowledge.
For more information about CodeX, please visit http://codex.stanford.edu.
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SIGNAL: Stanford Interdisciplinary Group in Neuroscience and Law meets monthly to discuss findings, issues, and updates related to the intersection of neuroscience and the law. Graduate, law, and post-doctoral students are invited. On September 29, 2009, Emily Murphy
led the first SIGNAL group meeting of this academic year in a discussion of Brain Electrical Oscillations Signature (BEOS) and other forensic investigation techniques, after interviewing C.R. Mukundan (inventor of BEOS) and the government head of forensic science from India, Dr. M.S. Rao. The discussion included the latest news for neuroscience in the courtroom.
CLB Fellows
Brenda Simon, Residential Fellow
Brenda Simon will continue as a senior fellow for the Center for Law & the Biosciences and the teaching fellow for the Law, Science & Technology LLM program, where she is responsible for teaching, advising, and admissions. Brenda’s research interests focus on the intersection of intellectual property and the biosciences. She is currently working on a paper that explores the use of patents to conceal information about shortcomings and a project examining how to best allocate patent cases among district court judges.
Before joining Stanford, she was an attorney at Fenwick & West, where she represented technology clients in intellectual property litigation and patent prosecution. Her pro bono representation of clients included successful appeals before the Ninth and Federal Circuits.
Recent Publications and Presentations:
Brenda M. Simon, "How to Get a Fair Share: IP Policies for Publicly Supported Biobanks," 1 Stan. J. L. Science & Pol’y 65 (2009). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1413951.
Brenda Simon, “Patent Silence: The Need for a Quality Assessment Defense,” Presenter, Intellectual Property Scholars Conference, Cardozo School of Law, August 6-7, 2009. Abstract available here.
Kelly Lowenberg, Residential Fellow
Kelly graduated from Stanford Law School in 2009, where she was co-president of the BioLaw and Health Policy Society and a member of the Stanford Journal for Law, Science, and Policy. Prior to law school, she worked for two years in Dr. Jonathan Cohen's lab at Princeton University assisting fMRI research on decision making. She has a B.A. in psychology from Pomona College, where she worked in Dr. Richard Lewis's EEG lab. Kelly is interested in how advances in biosciences (particularly neuroscience) intersect with civil rights, civil liberties, and consumer protection. She is excited to continue working at Stanford, where she is also a member of the Stanford Community Farm.
CJ Murdoch, Residential Fellow
CJ has conducted research with Timothy Caulfield for several years at the University of Alberta's Health Law Institute looking into issues surrounding genomics, patent law, and commercialization. CJ completed his articles of clerkship with the City of Edmonton and acquired his LLB and BA in Philosophy at the University of Alberta. His interests include mental health, genomics, commercialization, phenomenology, and music.
For more information about the Stanford Center for Law and the Biosciences, please visit http://clb.stanford.edu.
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We’re excited to have TTLF co-director Professor Siegfried Fina visit Stanford from the University of Vienna this year. Prof. Fina was awarded the Distinguished Austrian Visiting Professorship at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and will work as a visiting professor of law at Stanford Law School during the academic year 2009-2010.
Professor Siegfried Fina, TTLF Co-director and Visiting Professor of Law
Professor Siegfried Fina is a co-founder and co-director of the Stanford-Vienna Transatlantic Technology Law Forum, which was established as a joint initiative of Stanford Law School and the University of Vienna School of Law in 2004. Siegfried is an associate professor of European Union law and technology law at the University of Vienna School of Law in Austria and one of Europe’s leading scholars in European business and technology law. He created and directs the Vienna Technology Law Program, one of Europe’s most comprehensive and successful university-based tech law programs, as well as Vienna’s LLM Program in European and International Business Law, which emphasizes EU business law as well as international intellectual property and technology law. In early 2009, Siegfried was honored by the European Union and awarded one of the EU’s distinguished and
prestigious Jean Monnet Chairs for European Union Law for his achievements in research and education in EU law. His academic work focuses on business-related and technology-related law and policy of the European Union, as well as the legal aspects of the EU-U.S. trade and economic governance issues of the transatlantic marketplace. Siegfried is also affiliated with the Vienna University of Technology and the Danube University Krems in Austria. He is a member of the board of directors of the International Federation for European Law (FIDE) and Secretary-General of the Austrian Association for European Law (re-elected three times). Siegfried received a JD and JSD from the University of Vienna School of Law. In addition, he received a Diploma in Business Administration from the Vienna University of Economics and Business, a Diploma in Political Science from the University of Vienna
Department of Government and Political Science, and an interdisciplinary post-graduate Diploma in International Studies from the University of Vienna.
New TTLF Newsletter on Transatlantic Antitrust and IPR Developments
In addition to its comprehensive news section, the TTLF has introduced a bimonthly newsletter on transatlantic antitrust and IPR developments. Faculty members, TTLF Fellows, associated FCE Fellows, and the TTLF's international research affiliates feature current developments in these fields. Juha Vesala, who joined the TTLF as a TTLF Fellow in 2008, was appointed as the newsletter’s first editor-in-chief. For more information about this TTLF newsletter, please visit http://www.law.stanford.edu/program/centers/ttlf/#newsletter.
TTLF Research & Fellows
The TTLF Fellows have been working on the following research projects:
• A Comparative Analysis of Online Distribution of Software in the United States and Europe: Piracy or Freedom of "First Use"? (Petra Heindl)
• Extraterritorial Patent Jurisdiction: Can One Sue in Europe for Infringement of a U.S. Patent? (Marko Schauwecker)
• Nanotechnology Inventions in U.S. and European Patent Law (Marko Schauwecker)
• Margin Squeezes in the Telecommunications Industry under Antitrust Rules: A Comparative Analysis of the EU and U.S. Approaches (Sandra Marco Colino)
• Information Security Law in the EU and the U.S.: A Risk-Based Assessment of Implicit and Explicit Regulatory Policies (Lukas Feiler)
• The New EU Block Exemption Regulation and Guidelines on Vertical Restraints and Their Implications for E-Commerce in the EU and U.S. (Gabriele Accardo)
• The Consumer’s Right of Withdrawal and Distance Selling in Europe: A Consumer Stronghold in European Distance Selling and E-Commerce (Siegfried Fina)
• Ofcom’s Proposal to Regulate Access to Premium Television Content in the UK: Some Thoughts (Pablo Ibáñez Colomo)
• Biotechnological Inventions: A Comparison Between Europe and the United States (Christine Reiter)
• International IP and Regulatory Issues Involved in CNT Commercialization: Two Case Studies (Luca Escoffier)
For more information about the Stanford-Vienna Transatlantic Technology Law Forum (TTLF), please visit http://ttlf.stanford.edu.
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Created by the Stanford Program in Law, Science and Technology under the lead of LST faculty director Mark Lemley, IPLC Executive Director Joshua Walker
, and in collaboration with the Stanford Department of Computer Science, IPLC is designed to make IP litigation more transparent, covering all (1) patent infringement, (2) manifest copyright, (3) manifest trademark, (4) manifest antitrust, and (5) certain trade secret lawsuits filed in the U.S. District Court from January 1, 2000 to the present.
Officially launched in December 2008, the Stanford IPLC has recently finished the largest IP outcomes study in the history of the United States, for over 21,500 patent infringement outcomes. Over 5,000 IP experts and government end users have thus far benefitted from the site as of October, 31, 2009 , including the White House, Department of Commerce, U.S. District Courts, the Federal Circuit, IPLC advisor groups, over 200 academics, company and law firm supporters, non-profit lawyers, the National Academies, the National Science Foundation, the FTC, and the Senate Judiciary Committee.
The IPLC is the most comprehensive source of data available on over 100,000 intellectual property cases. The site is available to academics, students, government users, and press for free at http://lexmachina.stanford.edu. Commercial users can subscribe at http://lexmachina.com
. For more information, please visit http://www.law.stanford.edu/program/centers/iplc.
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The Kauffman Foundation has generously sponsored the Kauffman Legal Research Fellowship at Stanford Law School. The purpose of this fellowship is to promote research and curriculum development in subjects related to law, innovation, and economic growth, and more particularly regarding the impact of the “rule of law” and our legal system on innovation and economic growth.
Current Kauffman Fellow:
Felix Mormann
Prior to joining the Stanford Program in Law, Science and Technology as a Kauffman Legal Research Fellow, Felix was a visiting scholar at Berkeley Law School (Boalt Hall), where he conducted research for his doctoral dissertation on transatlantic securities litigation. Felix previously worked for some of Germany's premiere law firms and as a management consultant for McKinsey & Company. As a Kauffman Legal Research Fellow at Stanford Law School, Felix will examine various legal regimes with regard to their ability to promote the transition to renewable energy sources while cost-efficiently fostering economic growth and innovation in industries related to renewable energy. Felix received his LL.M. degree from Berkeley Law School. He earned his primary law degree from the University of Passau Law School in Germany.
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Law and Technology Student Groups
SLATA
On October 24th, 2009 the Stanford Law & Technology Association (SLATA) hosted a great group of panelists to celebrate its 25th Anniversary. Panelists included Kent Walker (Vice President & General Counsel, Google), Michael Sears (Investment Partner, Siemens Venture Capital), Nader Mousavi (Partner, WilmerHale), and Suzanne Bell (Partner, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati). SLATA brings together students, faculty, researchers and practitioners interested in law and technology. Ongoing events include the “Lunch with the JDs” program that connects practicing lawyers with SLS students, while “Dinner with the Profs” creates an informal way for students to hear about current technology law issues from leading legal scholars. For more information, including a list of all upcoming events, visit SLATA’s website at
http://slata.stanford.edu.
BIOLAW AND HEALTH POLICY SOCIETY
We welcome the new BioLaw and Health Policy Society co-presidents, Gayle Denman and Chrissy Brown-Marshall. The BioLaw & Health Policy Society will continue its regular lunch speaker series during this academic year.
For more information about the Stanford BioLaw and Health Policy Society, please visit http://www.stanford.edu/group/biolaw/.
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Faculty Leaders
G. Marcus Cole
Wm. Benjamin Scott and Luna M. Scott Professor of Law
Ronald J. Gilson
Charles J. Meyers Professor of Law and Business
Paul Goldstein
Stella W. and Ira S. Lillick Professor of Law
Henry T. “Hank” Greely (BA ’74)
Deane F. and Kate Edelman Johnson Professor of Law; Director, Center for Law and the Biosciences; Professor
(by courtesy) of Genetics, Stanford University School of Medicine; Steering Committee Chair and Director of Neuroethics, Center for Biomedical Ethics
Joseph A. Grundfest (JD ’78)
W. A. Franke Professor of Law and Business; Senior Faculty, Arthur and Toni Rembe Rock Center for Corporate Governance
Mark A. Lemley (BA ’88)
William H. Neukom Professor of Law; Director, Stanford Program in Law, Science & Technology and its LLM Program; Director, Transatlantic Technology Law Forum; Partner, Durie Tangri LLP
Barbara van Schewick
Assistant Professor of Law and (by Courtesy) Electrical Engineering; Co-Director, Center for Internet and Society
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CLB Speaker Series: Aaron Blackledge
November 18, 2009
Dr. Blackledge is a Board-certified Doctor in Family Medicine who completed his Residency at UCSF Sutter Santa Rosa Family Medicine Program. He graduated with Honors from Brown Medical School in 2001 after completing his preclinical sciences at Dartmouth Medical School as part of the Dartmouth-Brown Program. He will discuss the clinic he founded, Care Practice, and the new model of health care it represents. Care Practice opened in September 2008 with a mission to break down the barriers put between doctors and patients by establishing accessibility, transparency, and affordability to the practice of medicine. At its inception it was an experiment in growing a technology-driven modern medical clinic through social media platforms and word of mouth guerrilla marketing techniques. Dr. Blackledge and his team aim to integrate design and patient experience into a medical environment in a
manner that does not require large amounts of capital and to bring doctors out of the medical office building and back to the neighborhood where they can better serve the needs of their community.
Tenth Annual Advanced Patent Law Institute
December 10-11, 2009
Come to the heart of Silicon Valley and join leading judges and practitioners from major corporations such as Google, Microsoft, Intel and Genentech. This conference is sponsored by the Stanford Program in Law, Science & Technology; the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology at UC Berkeley; and the University of Texas School of Law. For more information and to register, please visit the event website.
Privacy 2010: Intelligent Information Privacy Management Symposium
March 23 - 25, 2010
This symposium takes a transdisciplinary approach in its exploration of privacy management by drawing from the key areas of Law, Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, and Business. It will focus on the need to develop effective information privacy management frameworks, tools and techniques by addressing the underlying tension between transparency and disclosure in the privacy versus business strategy arenas. There is a significant and growing need to identify privacy requirements in application development and to use intelligent technology-enabled solutions to assist users to monitor and manage their personal information in a more transparent, proactive fashion.
The free flow of personal information that respects privacy can fuel and cultivate innovation. Optimizing the risks and rewards across the stakeholders may lead to new forms of innovation and the release of new economic value. The fundamental challenge is to establish legal regimes that enable innovation and facilitate information sharing across jurisdictions in global business. This symposium invites proposals from scholars with diverse backgrounds sharing a common aim: to contribute to development of transdisciplinary solutions to this fundamental challenge. For more information, please visit the event website.
Antitrust Section Symposium on Innovation
May 20-21, 2010
Sponsored by the American Bar Association. For more information, please visit the ABA's event website.
Seventh Annual E-Commerce Best Practices Conference
June 25, 2010
The Stanford Program in Law, Science & Technology (LST), its Center for E-Commerce, and the San Francisco Bay Area Chapter of the Association of Corporate Counsels (ACC) are continuing their efforts to bring to the fore issues relating to the many legal uncertainties that arise when doing business online. This year's program will cover a wide array of current issues facing the e-commerce industry and will feature a roundtable of general counsels from leading e-commerce companies. Join us for an informative discussion with leading experts from industry, legal practice and academia. For more information, please visit the event website.
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Recent Events
Legal Challenges in an Age of Robotics
November 12, 2009
Once relegated to factories and fiction, robots are rapidly entering the mainstream. Advances in artificial intelligence translate into ever-broadening functionality and autonomy. Recent years have seen an explosion in the use of robotics in warfare, medicine, and exploration. Industry analysts and UN statistics predict equally significant growth in the market for personal or service robotics over the next few years. What unique legal challenges will the widespread availability of sophisticated robots pose? Three panelists with deep and varied expertise discussed the present, near future, and far future of robotics and the law.
Panelists:
* Kenneth Anderson, Professor of Law, American University; Research Fellow, Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University
* Paul Saffo, Consulting Associate Professor, Stanford University; Visiting Scholar, Stanford Media X; Columnist, ABCNews.com
* F. Daniel Siciliano, Faculty Director, Arthur and Toni Rembe Rock Center for Corporate Governance; Senior Lecturer in Law and Associate Dean for Executive Education and Special Programs, Stanford Law School
Moderator: M. Ryan Calo, Residential Fellow, Stanford Center for Internet and Society
H1N1 Influenza: Legal Issues in Responding to a Pandemic
November 12, 2009
A panel comprised of doctors, county health officials, and law professors discussed the legal ramifications of measures taken to combat swine flu. Sponsored by the Stanford Center for Law and the Biosciences and the Stanford BioLaw and Health Policy Society.
Panelists:
* Cornelia L. Dekker, M.D., Professor, Stanford School of Medicine; Medical Director, Stanford-LPCH Vaccine Program
* Hank T. Greely, Professor of Law, Stanford Law School; Chair, Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics; Director, Stanford Center for Law and the Biosciences and the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics’ Program in Neuroethics
* Martin Fenstersheib, Health Officer and Public Health Medical Director, Santa Clara County; Chair, Department of Community Health and Preventive Medicine, Valley Medical Center; Vice President for Community Health, Santa Clara County Medical Association.
Codex Speaker Series: Monica Palmirani, Professor of Legal Informatics at the University of Bologna - CIRSFID
November 11, 2009
The White House, U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) and the National Archives’ Office of the Federal Register (OFR) recently revolutionized public access to Government information. The GPO converted the text of the Federal Register into XML (extensible markup language) and placed it online on numerous Federal Government portals. XML is a form of text that can be manipulated in almost unlimited ways by digital applications, providing not only transparency to Government, but also providing citizens direct access to a permanent repository of authentic Federal Government information, paving the way for consumers, rather than Government officials, to determine how to access critical information. The same process has been taking place in other legal systems around the world, in particular in the European Union, where a similar XML format, for the similar government information, has
been recently standardized.
Professor Monica Palmirani is a leading authority in this field, having contributed to the definition of the EU XML standard language, and the analogous standards for African and Latin American governments. She will share her thoughts on some of the world's important initiatives in opening government information to innovative applications, and the possibilities and challenges that arise using current approaches to making legal information available and manageable in digital formats.
CIS Speaker Series - Betsy Masiello, Google Policy Analyst
November 2, 2009
The Web has enabled unprecedented levels of communication and sharing, expanding access to information around the globe, while also raising broad concerns about the future of individual privacy. This talk explored a range of frameworks that can be used to understand privacy today, and the fundamental engineering challenges that follow in designing privacy into information products.
Betsy Masiello is a Policy Analyst on Google’s public policy team and is one of the internal leads for Google’s privacy engineering efforts. Prior to joining Google she was a consultant at McKinsey & Company, where she served global telecommunications companies on new business strategies around emerging technology. Academically, Masiello holds a BA in Computer Science from Wellesley College, a MSc in Economics from Oxford where she was a Rhodes Scholar, and an SM from MIT’s Technology & Policy Program.
Minds For Sale - CodeX Speaker Series with Jonathan Zittrain
October 29, 2009
Cloud computing is not just for computing anymore: you can now find as much mindshare as you can afford out in the cloud, too. A new range of projects is making the application of human brainpower as purchasable and fungible as additional server rackspace. What are some of the issues arising as armies of thinkers are recruited by the thousands and millions? A fascinating (and non-scare-mongering) view is offered of a future in which nearly any mental act can be bought and sold. CodeX Speaker Jonathan Zittrain is the Edwin A. Heafey, Jr., Visiting Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, where he co-founded its Berkman Center for Internet & Society. Previously he was Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation at Oxford University. For more information and a video recording of the discussion, please visit the
event website.
The Role of Courts in Patent Law and Policy
October 23, 2009
The Stanford Program in Law, Science and Technology teamed up with Georgetown University Law Center to host a unique conference examining the role of courts in patent law and policy. The conference featured federal judges who addressed cutting-edge issues in patent law, as well as insight from leading scholars, policy makers, and practitioners regarding the latest research on patent law policy. For more information, including reading materials and a conference webcast, please visit the event website.
CIS Speaker Series - Mark Lemley: The Patent Crisis and How the Courts Can Solve It
October 12, 2009
CIS and the Federalist Society sponsored Mark Lemley's discussion of his new book, The Patent Crisis and How the Courts Can Solve It. Patent law is crucial to encourage technological innovation. But as the patent system currently stands, diverse industries from pharmaceuticals to software to semiconductors are all governed by the same rules even though they innovate very differently. The result is a crisis in the patent system, where patents calibrated to the needs of prescription drugs wreak havoc on information technologies and vice versa. According to Dan L. Burk and Mark A. Lemley in The Patent Crisis and How the Courts Can Solve It, courts should use the tools the patent system already gives them to treat patents in different industries differently. Industry tailoring is the only way to provide an appropriate level of incentive for each industry.
Patent Litigation at the International Trade Commission
September 28, 2009
In collaboration with its affiliate Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP
, the Stanford Program in Law, Science and Technology sponsored an evening panel dedicated to patent litigation at the International Trade Commission (ITC). The expert panel, which included Adminstrative Law Judge Carl Charneski from the ITC, Stanford Law Professor and LST faculty director Mark Lemley, Steve Adkins from Orrick and Win Hwangbo from Toshiba, provided a succinct overview of the ITC and “Section 337” investigations (relating to patent infringement). Topics included recent trends in the use of the ITC as a patent litigation forum; strategies for working with the ITC to initiate or respond to an investigation; the domestic industry issue; the interplay between parallel ITC investigations and district court actions; strategies for working with the U.S. Customs Service to enforce ITC decisions; and the implications of patent reform. For more information
and a video recording of the event, please visit the event website.
Fireside Discussion on Legal Aspects of Autonomous Cars
August 12, 2009
In collaboration with the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford (CARS), the Stanford Program in Law, Science and Technology hosted an informal discussion on legal issues surrounding autonomous cars. The idea to bring automotive and legal experts together emerged at a seminar class in engineering in the Spring of 2009, when law students and faculty joined engineering students and industry partners for a first evaluation of what will happen when autonomous vehicles enter public roads. The fireside discussion brought together CARS affiliates as well as staff from the CodeX center and the Center for Internet and Society. It provided for an interesting exchange of ideas between technology lawyers and engineers with expertise in the automotive industry. From the conversation among the workshop participants, it became clear that the automotive industry is seeking collaboration with the
legal and policy communities to develop scenarios of how this novel technology can be deployed in public, while minimizing risks to individuals and liability exposure of the industry. The attendees agreed to explore the possibility of hosting a conference at Stanford that will bring together the experts in the automotive and legal fields to start a larger public discourse about these issues. For more information about the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford (CARS), please visit http://automotive.stanford.edu.
Ninth Annual Intellectual Property Scholars Conference
August 6-7, 2009
The Stanford Program in Law, Science and Technology partnered with the Intellectual Property Program at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology, and the DePaul University Center for Intellectual Property Law & Information Technology to host approximately 130 scholars from more than 75 institutions in 10 countries who attended the event. IPSC brings together intellectual property scholars to present their works-in-progress, and offers young scholars opportunities to network and seek guidance from their veteran colleagues. For more information, including conference paper submissions and video recordings, please visit http://www.ipscholars.org/.
Sixth Annual Stanford E-Commerce Best Practices Conference
June 12, 2009
The Stanford Program in Law, Science, and Technology, its Center for E-Commerce, and the San Francisco bay Area Chapter of the Association of Corporate Counsels (ACC), teamed up again to continue their effort of highlighting and addressing legal uncertainties of doing business online. The conference panels covered topics ranging from cyber-security, e-commerce patents, content aggregation and trespass issues, the legal issues surrounding the online activities of minors, user-generated content, and affiliate marketing over the internet. The panelists also discussed best practices surrounding the establishment of online stores in non-US jurisdictions as well as best practices for drafting terms of use. For more information and video recordings of this event, please visit the
event website.
Stanford Law School Conference on Intellectual Property Law and the Biosciences
May 8, 2009
In collaboration with its affiliate WilmerHale, the Stanford Program in Law, Science and Technology hosted a conference on the latest developments in intellectual property and the biosciences. The event drew more than 300 attendees and featured the nation’s leading experts from the bench, academia and practice in a discussion of current legal and policy issues affecting the bioscience industry. The topics of discussion included current issues surrounding patent litigation in the biosciences realm, exhaustion, implied licenses and reach-through claims, patentable subject matter, the non-obviousness doctrine, and licensing after MedImmune.
Stephen Juelsgaard ('82), former Executive Vice-President and Chief Compliance Officer of Genentech, Inc., delivered a thought-provoking keynote address on the business of patents in a biopharmaceutical company, international patent strategy, and the future landscape of science and the law. For more information and audio recordings of this event, please visit: http://www.slsipbioconference.com.
Play Machinima Law Conference
April 24 – 25, 2009
This two-day conference, organized by the Center for Internet and Society, covered key issues associated with player-generated, computer-animated cinema that is based on 3D game and virtual world environments. Speakers included machinima artists/players, legal experts, commercial game developers and theorists. Topics included: game art, game hacking, open source and “modding,” player/consumer-driven innovation, cultural/technology studies, fan culture, legal and business issues, transgressive play, game preservation, and notions of collaborative co-creation drawn from virtual worlds and online games. Films were shown throughout the conference, including: Douglas Grayeton's "Molotov Alva and His Search for the Creator" and Joshua Diltz' "Mercy of the Sea." For more information and video recordings, please visit the
event website.
Keyword Ads and Trademark Infringement 2009
April 23, 2009
Keyword advertising is a multibillion-dollar industry that generates much business and great liability for search engines and their advertisers. However, the legal status of keyword advertising is still unclear, leaving much room for global debate. The Stanford Program in Law, Science and Technology and its Transatlantic Technology Law Forum sponsored a discussion featuring Professor Alexander Tsoutsanis
from Leiden Law School in the Netherlands. Prof. Tsoutsanis, who litigated keyword ad cases before the European Court of Justice, discussed recent U.S. and European case-law discussion U.S. and European trademark doctrines in the context of keyword ads.
Energy Security & Climate Change: Moving from Aspirations to Reality and Compliance
April 15, 2009
In collaboration with its affiliate Winston Strawn LLP
, the Stanford Program in Law, Science and Technology hosted a panel on current issues surrounding energy security and climate change. The panel of experts, including Paul Clanon from the California Public Utilities Commission, Frank De Rosa from NextLight Renewables LLC, Prof. Michael Wara from Stanford Law School, and Marianne Wu from MDV-Mohr Davidow Ventures, addressed a range of issues including the political and economic realities of developing renewable energy portfolios. The panel was moderated by Jerry Bloom from Winston and Strawn. For more information and a video recording of the event, please visit the event website.
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About LST@Stanford
LST@Stanford is produced by the staff of the Stanford Program in Law, Science & Technology.
Faculty Director
Mark A. Lemley
Executive Director
Roland Vogl
Contributing Writer
Yin-Chen Phang
Editor & Producer
Christina Luce
Contact
tech@law.stanford.edu
http://lst.stanford.edu
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