Intellectual Property

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Intellectual property law, an increasingly prominent topic of public debate, functions at the margins or in the background of many communities and organizations. As one example familiar to professors, a university’s core missions are both to educate and to promote research across the disciplines, which have largely been done without the necessity of intellectual property law. But the role of IP at the university sparks debate, as most tech-transfer offices remain cost centers, universities begin licensing teaching materials and moving classrooms online, and universities more zealously guard their trademarks. Many communities strongly defined by values and missions—museums, libraries and archives, agricultural or craft cooperatives, musical or dramatic institutions such as symphonies and theatrical repertories, hospitals, professional sports associations, and charitable organizations—are experiencing a shifting focus on intellectual property as both a problem and a possible solution to the maintenance of their missions. In this panel, we explore the diverse roles that intellectual property plays to undermine or sustain defining values of particular communities—values that may be orthogonal or alternative to IP’s traditional market-driven justification.