'Copyright and Property-Think': Thirteenth Annual International Intellectual Property Lecture by Jessica Litman

Professor Litman, John F. Nickoll Professor of Law at the University of Michigan, delivered the thirteenth Annual International Intellectual Property Lecture (funded from the Herchel Smith Bequest) at Emmanuel College entitled 'Copyright and Property-Think' on 13 March 2018 as a guest of CIPIL (the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law). Professor Jessica Litman is the John F. Nickoll Professor of Law at the University of Michigan, where she teaches copyright law, trademark law, and advanced IP courses. Litman is the author of Digital Copyright and the co-author, with Jane Ginsburg and Mary Lou Kevlin, of the casebook Trademarks and Unfair Competition Law: Cases and Materials. She is an adviser for the American Law Institute's Restatement of Copyright, and has served as a trustee of the Copyright Society of the USA, and chair of the Association of American Law Schools Section on Intellectual Property. In this year’s lecture, she will argue that when we think about the copyright system, our assumptions about legal property rights shape what we see and what we don’t. We assume that broadening or narrowing the scope of copyright will redound to the benefit or detriment of creators. Three hundred years of evidence, though, belie that supposition. We need to think more concretely about copyright law's actual effect on creators, and their ability to communicate and profit from their works. For more information see the CIPIL website at http://www.cipil.law.cam.ac.uk