Intellectual Property in the Digital Economy

Technological advances in the online world pose important challenges for legislators, authorities and courts to accomplish the promotion of innovation, efficiency and growth. This course focuses on the evolving intellectual property law regimes of the new digital age. It covers the legal and economic principles that govern private and public relationships in the digital environment, deploying concrete examples – cases, technological developments, legal amendments – to demonstrate that the digitalization of the economy is an important issue that lawyers need to be able to wrestle with.

The problems discussed in this course will be exemplified by specific cases from Swiss, European and U.S. legal practice. A comparative analysis of the covered materials offers an opportunity to explore key dimensions of intellectual property law and to analyze the potential for re-adjustment of pertinent legal rules and their enforcement in a digitalized economy.

The course syllabus (available on OLAT) sets forth the basic credit requirements and reading assignments for each class session. We will meet on Fridays from 14:00-15:45. Students must write a paper consisting of 3000 words, be prepared to take responsibility for a set of cases and to help lead discussion on them (if possible, multiple students will be assigned to each session and will start off with a brief overview of the case and several questions).