IP and Antitrust

It is no accident that the nation’s #1 ranked IP program sits in the world’s most storied innovation hub, the San Francisco Bay Area. For over 25 years, BCLT and its faculty co-directors have brought leading academics and the nation’s top innovators together to explore IP law, its impacts on innovation, its impacts on society, and its future direction.

This collaboration has not only resulted in leading scholarship— it also has created an unmatched educational environment for students. The current course catalog contains dozens of courses focused on core IP topics. Students can take the critical

Students can also select from many highly-specialized IP courses that are taught by practitioner-lecturers drawn from the Bay Area’s top law firms and companies. Students leave Berkeley Law ready to practice IP law and ready to adapt to inevitable changes in IP law.

“Through teaching, scholarship, and industry-professional gatherings of all kinds, BCLT has played a leading role in accelerating our understanding of contemporary challenges to the patent system, and in advocating research-based policy proposals on various issues (patent troll litigation; the importance of patents to venture capitalists and other investors; patents and overseas trade/ supply chains; etc.). A distinctive “west coast” approach to patent law has emerged over the past thirty or so years, and BCLT has played a leading role in convening companies, law firms and policymakers of all kinds to shape and foster this approach. The very wide range of our patent-related courses, programs, and scholarship in this field bear witness to the interest in and value of this distinctive approach to the ever-changing and still-important field of patent law.”

- Rob Merges, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati Professor of Law and Associate Dean of Advanced Degree Programs and Global Engagement

Advanced Samuelson Clinic & Seminar Art and Cultural Property Law Antitrust Antitrust and Innovation Antitrust and Technology Platforms Art and Cultural Property Law Business of Intellectual Property Chinese IP Law Copyright Law Copyright, Competition, and Technology Intellectual Property Law International Antitrust Law IP in the Music Industry IP Practicum Clinic Law and Technology Writing Workshop Mergers, Market Power and Monopoly in U.S. Antitrust Law Patent Law Patent Litigation I Patent Litigation II: PTAB and ITC Patent Prosecution Patent Remedies Preparing to Practice Patent Law Samuelson Clinic & Seminar Technology for Lawyers Trade Secret Law Trademark Law Trademark Practice Transnational Intellectual Property Law

Associate Dean for Faculty Development and Research

Robert and Nanci Corson Assistant Professor of Law

Koret Professor of Law

Richard M. Sherman Distinguished Professor of Law and Information

Assistant Professor of Law

Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati Professor of Law and Associate Dean of Advanced Degee Programs and Global Engagement

Harold C. Hohbach Distinguished Professor of Patent Law and IP and Associate Dean for J.D. Curriculum and Teaching

26th Annual BCLT-BTLJ Symposium: The Emergent Right to Repair April 22, 2022 With today’s software-enabled products, including our cars and toasters, we can no longer take for granted a right to repair them ourselves or to take them to the local repair shop of our choosing. In response to legal and technological restrictions, a growing movement advocating a right to repair has emerged, despite pushback from some quarters. Manufacturers and device makers remain skeptical of an unfettered right to repair, citing concerns over intellectual property rights, reliability, security, and lost revenue. This symposium will consider the complex, overlapping set of policy questions at the center of the repair debate. How do restrictions on repair, or their elimination, affect competition? How might policymakers resolve potential tensions between the right to repair and the intellectual property rights of device makers? Would the consumer benefits of openrepair markets outweigh their risks? And what legislative solutions or other policy interventions are bestsuited to address these questions?

22nd Annual Berkeley-Stanford Advanced Patent Law Institute December 9-10, 2021 APLI presents a roster of judges, academics, litigators, patent prosecutors, and senior IP counsel from major corporations offering a results-oriented, in-depth look at the latest developments in patent law and practice.

Annual Intellectual Property Scholars Conference Summer 2021 The IPSC brings together intellectual property scholars to present their works-in-progress in order to benefit from the critique of colleagues. The conference is co-sponsored by the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology, UC Berkeley School of Law; the Intellectual Property and Information Law Program, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University; the Center for Intellectual Property Law and Information Technology, DePaul University College of Law; and the Stanford Program in Law, Science & Technology, Stanford Law School.

Google v. Oracle: An Initial Appraisal April 20, 2021 On April 5, the Supreme Court handed down its much-anticipated decision in one of the most consequential copyright cases of our time, Google v. Oracle. Our assessment of this momentous decision was led by Professors Peter Menell and Pamela Samuelson. In addition to filing amicus briefs in the case, they have written extensively about it and the broader issues of software copyright.

BCLT/BTLJ Design Patents Symposium: Navigating and Rectifying the Design Patent Muddle February 19, 2021 This symposium explored the history of design patent protection and the evolution of the key ornamentality/non-functionality doctrine. The lead paper, Design Patent Law’s Identity Crisis, authored by Professor Peter Menell and Ella Corren, framed the Symposium. Panels comprised of academic and practitioner commentators discussed the past, present, and future of design protection.