Date: Thursday, December 17, 2009
Time: 12:30 -1:30 pm
Location: 306 Sherrerd Hall
Food at 12:30 pm. Discussion begins at 12:45 pm. Everyone invited.

Much of the current intellectual property system can be explained as meeting the needs of
a culture industry based on individual authors who look to corporate entities to mass
produce and distribute cultural products. Today, however, as digital technology decreases
the cost of both the production and distribution of cultural products, individuals have
taken on previously corporate roles. Authors now seek copyright and trademark
protection for their work in ways that expand authorial control at the expense of the
intellectual property system as a whole. In this essay I argue that these new modes of
generating value may require protection but that the current intellectual property system
is not equipped to provide such protection without upsetting the balance between creators
and users. This essay seeks to map authors’ new interests as a way to show where the
intellectual property system can meet these new needs or where it must change. Given the
speed with which technology and this type of production evolves, I offer that the law may
not be the best way to manage many of these interests at all.

Deven Desai Individual Branding Paper

Bio:

Deven Desai is a Visiting Fellow at the Center for Information Technology Policy (Princeton University) and an Associate Professor of Law at the Thomas Jefferson School of Law where he teaches trademark, intellectual property theory, and information privacy law. Professor Desai’s scholarship applies rhetorical theory to analyze the ways in which business interests (and attendant economic theories) shape intellectual property law and to reveal where those arguments explain productivity or where they fail to capture society’s interest in the free flow of information and development. His work aims to use intellectual property and information law as a lens to develop and offer a theory of productivity that mediates the tension between proprietary and open access understandings present in those doctrines. His recent law review articles include Privacy? Property?: Reflections on the Implications of a Post-Human World 18 Kansas J. of Law & Public Policy (2009) (forthcoming); Property, Persona, and Preservation, 81 Temple Law Review 67 (2008); and Confronting the Genericism Conundrum, 28 Cardozo L. Rev. 1789 (2007) (Sandra L. Rierson, co-author).

Deven is a graduate of Yale Law School where he was co-editor-in-chief of the Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities and of the University of California, Berkeley where he studied rhetoric. Before beginning his academic career, he practiced law with Quinn Emanuel Urquhart Oliver & Hedges in Los Angeles, worked as in-house counsel with technology incubation companies and Mattel, Inc., and as a policy and finance consultant for the Cory Booker for Mayor campaign.

Deven blogs about law, technology, and society at Concurring Opinions and Madisonian .