Sharing files
Intellectual property focus preparing students to confront copyright issues
Jim Gibson talks to University of Virginia students about the legality of peer-to-peer file sharing. It was one of several stops he made on a multi-city tour to raise awareness of copyright laws in the digital age.
BY MICHELLE HERSHMAN, L’07
Napster might be out of style, but BitTorrent is all the rage. BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer file distribution protocol, designed to distribute large amounts of data without using costly server and bandwidth resources. Basically, BitTorrent is another way for students to partake in file-sharing.
BitTorrent has not yet been found liable for copyright infringement, but certain uses of it raise intellectual property concerns.
“There has been at least one shutdown, but BitTorrent is still kind of grassroots,” says Chris Cotropia, who teaches intellectual property at Richmond School of Law. “You can use it if you want to.”
College campuses are grappling with illegal file-sharing, and Richmond is not immune. Fortunately, the intellectual property program at the law school is preparing students to deal with the growing field.
Law School Dean Rodney A. Smolla started discussing the need for specialization in intellectual property a few years ago. Along with Jim Gibson, assistant professor of law, Smolla co-founded the Intellectual Property Institute and named Gibson director. The institute, however, is very much a team effort.
“There’s not much of a division of labor,” Gibson says. “Other law school professors, such as Smolla and Carl Tobias, help out with institute projects.”
Their purpose is to create an active scholarly program of conferences and publications, focusing on intellectual property issues.
“It has become a lightning rod to help organize activities,” Gibson says. “The Student Intellectual Property Law Association is key in getting events done. And the students are currently doing a Richmond intellectual property blog.” (See ipinstitute.blogspot.com.)
The first thing the institute did was create a file-sharing education program called the National CyberEducation Project. The program helps undergraduate students understand why intellectual property is important. It is financed by the law school and the Media Institute, a nonprofit foundation in Washington, D.C., that specializes in free-speech issues.
Gibson’s philosophy is to educate students and allow them to educate each other. In the end, he said, they will make their own decisions.
“It’s not good to shout at them,” he says. “Instead, explain rationales for intellectual property law, good and bad. Then, students might do the right thing even without the threat of legal consequences.”
This fall, the school added faculty to begin offering a certificate of concentration in intellectual property law for Richmond law students.
“Having three faculty members lets you focus on intellectual property as a big program,” says Gibson, who took only one intellectual property course in law school but kept bumping into the topic in his career.
Cotropia is one of the new faculty members, along with Kristen Osenga, a patent specialist who joined the faculty from Chicago-Kent College of Law.
“Because we are all full-time faculty, we can teach so many more full-time classes,” says Cotropia, who focused on intellectual property in law school. “This makes our school unique.”
Law students now will be able to take more than just Introduction to Intellectual Property and other basic classes. The offerings range from Advanced Patent Law to Computer Law to Entertainment Law.
Both professors believe intellectual property is playing a greater role in the national economy and becoming more important to a general practice.
“Intellectual property rights are broader than they ever were,” Gibson says. “It’s increasingly important to have lawyers who specialize in the field.”
The number of students graduating with an intellectual property specialization this year will be low because most third-year law students have not taken the 15 required intellectual property credits on top of the required course, Intellectual Property Fundamentals. Students also must satisfy their upper-level writing requirement on an intellectual property-related subject and achieve a minimum 3.0 grade point average in the certificate courses. However, Cotropia and Gibson expect to have around 20–25 specialized students in the next three years, which is a high percentage for a small law school.
To help build the program, the institute formed a partnership with Virginia Tech under which science and engineering majors can come to Richmond’s law school and receive a dual degree with an intellectual property specialization.
Meanwhile, the institute’s faculty will continue to lecture, attend conferences and write papers to become more visible on the intellectual property scene.
“The more distinction the school has in the area of intellectual property, the more it will help students become employed in that field,” Cotropia says.