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New Akron Law IP head talks tech law trends
RICHARD WEINER
Legal News Reporter
Published: November 26, 2014
Two recent additions to the teaching and administrative staff of The University of Akron School of Law have propelled the school to a position as having “one of the top cyberspace law contingents in any law school in the country,” according to new law school dean Matthew Wilson.
The primary addition to the staff of cyberlaw experts is Jacqueline Lipton, who has recently taken a position as the law school’s David L. Brennan Professor of Law and director of the Center for Intellectual Property Law and Technology.
“Jackie Lipton’s presence here is a great opportunity for the law students but also for the local area as well, to have someone as distinguished as she is within the areas of international technology and cyberspace law,” said Wilson.
“This will really help to get the program to the next level,” said Wilson, noting that the school already had a strong presence in the field, and that he too is the second new resource, as he studies and teaches in the area of international technology law.
Lipton, 47, teaches trademark law, cyberlaw and international intellectual property law, and is the co-author of multiple editions of a leading cyberspace casebook as well as numerous other casebooks and articles.
Lipton’s interest in cyberlaw began when she worked as a commercial law attorney in her native Australia.
“It came up a lot as new law when I was practicing in Australia as a finance lawyer in the 1990s,” she said. “We were dealing with issues like securitization, early versions of electronic share trading and electronic payment systems, valuing internet domain names, the increasing digitization of assets” and much more newly-developing electronic law.
At the same time, she became increasingly interested in the possibilities of teaching and took a faculty position at Monash University in Melbourne in 1995. Her academic career eventually led her, her husband and three children out of Australia—first to Britain and then to a position at Case Western Reserve University, where she served as the director of that school’s Center for Law, Technology & the Arts.
For the last two years before coming to Akron she held a position at the University of Houston Law center.
“And then we came back to the Cleveland area,” she said.
Lipton shared a few observations on current trends in cyberlaw.
“Privacy issues are very big in Europe right now, and it will be interesting to see if those issues also become big in the U.S.,” she said, noting that what upsets people is public distribution of personal information gleaned from customer and employee databases as well as other privacy issues. “This issue is going to be bigger going forward.”
Digital copyright is another issue that Lipton thinks will draw people’s attention in the future. “This is a big project,” she said. “We have to take a look at copyright law to see what needs revision,” based upon the rapid growth of the new technologies dedicated to the distribution of music, movies and other media.
“I have also done a fair amount of work on the new domain name gTLD’s (new endings to web addresses beyond .com, .edu, etc.),” she said. This is the new list of domains that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) opened up for users last year, she said.
“There have been a couple of hundred applications for the new gTLD’s,” she said. “The application is very expensive, so most of the applications are coming from Google and Amazon. There are not a lot of major trademark holders becoming applicants. They are still doing all of the legals and deciding which applications to grant.” The ICANN website has a full overview of this topic.
Lipton noted that the U.S. Supreme Court has tackled a number of patent cases dealing with digital and biological technology. “The court is very big in technology at the moment,” she said.
The area of cybersecurity is one that is difficult to pin down, said Lipton.
“This is one of the areas where one wonders how relevant the law really is,” she said. “I need to do more thinking on it, but state and federal laws dealing with anti-hacking, data protection, trade secrets—I’m not sure how effective they are.”
Rather than just enforcing a law, the professor said that dealing with those issues is more about “understanding the technology and becoming educated about the market issues.
“Cybercrime is very difficult to prosecute unless the prosecution knows the field. On the civil side, many companies do not want the public to know (that their data may have been compromised). It is difficult to punish hacking. I am skeptical that the law makes a difference (overall).”
Beyond understanding all of this new law, Lipton is getting used to the idea of spending another winter in Cleveland after two years in Texas.
“The kids are really excited about building a snowman,” she said. “I am not looking forward to this weather.”