IP rights a new frontier for universities

Prof. Urban joins other experts in panel discussion

Universities are entering a brave new world as technology raises the importance and complexity of intellectual property concerns, USC Law Professor Jennifer Urban said during a special panel March 27.

Prof. Urban, left, and Cowan

Urban, director of the USC Intellectual and Technology Law Clinic, joined David A. Abel, president and CEO of the publishing house ABL; Lincoln Bandlow, partner at Fox, Spillane & Schaeffer and visiting professor at Annenberg School of Journalism; Larry Gross, the director of Annenberg; and Michael Renov, associate dean of the USC School of Cinematic Arts and professor of critical studies.

The panel, “Intellectual property rights and the modern university: How to move forward in the 21st Century,” was moderated by Annenberg Dean Geoffrey Cowan and sponsored by the USC Free Culture Club and Annenberg.

Since its inception, Urban noted, the university has been a world whose center does not take on a material form.

“Other than a court, a university is the only other institution I can think of whose purpose is to find the truth and disseminate it,” Urban said. “One of the amazing things about the digital revolution is the promise it provides for universities.”

As intellectual property laws have developed, they have become more sophisticated and ever more relevant to university business: It is now easier and less expensive for others to disseminate the knowledge that universities have been providing for generations. At the same time, Urban said, universities “need funding in order to do all these wonderful things.”

“We are looking less like Socrates with his acolytes at his knee and we really look more like a business,” she said.

Universities’ faculty and students are both creators and consumers of intellectual property, Dean Cowan noted – creators of courses, articles, lessons, papers films and other projects; and consumers of textbooks and other materials needed to teach or learn.

A balance is needed to protect the rights of both creator and consumer, Abel noted.

“Finding that balance is something, as an entrepreneur, I haven’t done,” he said.

Discussions within USC’s School of Cinematic Arts on the topic have taught Renov that one size does not fit all when it comes to applying intellectual property rights, he said.

“It’s really well nigh impossible to produce a film all by yourself,” Renov said. “Since it takes a collaboration of a writer, director, producer, cinematographer, editor and set designers … what you have is something like collective ownership, and that’s something (the School of Cinematic Arts has) had to grapple with.”

The school maintains the rights to films created by students – which are made with university equipment – but the students maintain the underlying intellectual property rights, Renov said.

Bandlow, who has represented clients in the movie industry who are on both sides of the intellectual property equation, said that a better explanation of IP laws is needed from the judiciary.

“We’re going to be seeing a lot more litigation of fair use issues – and we need to,” Bandlow said.