About the Conference

Intellectual property protection has always been a contentious field of study, but one largely left to ivory tower elites and industry insiders. With the rise of the Internet, however, IP disputes have become a matter of widespread public interest and concern. Controversial issues and questions abound: What rights do artists and inventors have in their intellectual creations? Now that "Napsterization" of copyrighted works is upon us, do we need to rework incentives for promoting the "useful arts"? Should newer works receive the same copyright protection as the existing body of copyrighted material? Or can existing laws along with market solutions, such as digital rights management, protect copyrights? Is there still a role for compulsory licensing, or has digitization taken away the market failure arguments that supported it in the past? Is the anti-circumvention provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act unconstitutional? And when does "fair use" become an illegal circumvention? On the patent front, are new forms of "business method patents" a break from the past, or are they simply a logical evolution of existing standards? Those issues and many others will be explored in this one-day Cato conference.