Universities generate an enormous amount of intellectual property, including copyrights, trademarks, patents, Internet domain names and even trade secrets. Until recently, universities often ceded ownership of this property to the faculty member or student by whom it was created or discovered. Increasingly, though, universities have become protective of this property, behaving like private firms, suing to protect trademarked sports logos, patents and name brands. Yet how can private rights accumulation and enforcement further the public interest in higher education? What is to be gained and lost as institutions become more guarded and contentious in their orientation toward intellectual property? In this lecture, law professor Jacob H. Rooksby uses a mixture of research methods to grapple with those central questions, exposing and critiquing the industry's unquestioned and growing embrace of intellectual property from the perspective of research in law, higher education and the social sciences.
Lunch will be served at 11:30 a.m. The lecture will begin at noon. The event is free and open to the public, but please register. Registration opens soon. Parking is available for a fee in the West Broad Street, West Main Street and West Cary Street parking decks. If special accommodations are needed, please call the VCU Libraries Events Office at (804) 828-0593 prior to March 20, 2017.
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