2017 University Lecture
The Liberty to Copy Unpatented Inventions: Potential Collisions with Trademark and Copyright Law
Presented by Wendy J. Gordon, William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor and Professor of Law
Monday, November 6, 2017 at 7 p.m.
Tsai Performance Center
685 Commonwealth Avenue
Boston, Massachusetts
Admission is free. The public is cordially invited.
Wendy J. Gordon is William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor and Professor of Law at Boston University, where she has taught since 1993. Her scholarship utilizes economics, as well as ethics and analytic philosophy to understand copyright, trademark, and related forms of intellectual property. She has earned national recognition for widely published, contemporary analyses of copyright’s “fair use” doctrine and of John Locke’s theory of property.
An enthusiastic proponent of interdisciplinary teaching and scholarship, Professor Gordon has co-taught a course in law and literature with a literary critic, a course on political theory with a philosopher, and a course on ‘copyright and rhetoric’ with a Shakespearean actor. Her current scholarship also examines copyright infringement as a mirror-image of the law of accidental injury, with both holding the potential to improve private decision-making: The threat of negligence liability decreases careless behavior by helping people understand they will bear some cost of the harm they cause. Conversely, the promise of copyright liability increases creative behavior by enabling people to capture some profit from the benefits they generate.
Professor Gordon has co-authored two books on the economics of copyright, published numerous law journal articles, and written book chapters on copyright issues, free speech, computer copyright, and the fair use doctrine. She serves on the editorial board of the European Journal of Law and Economics.
The U.S. Supreme Court has three times cited her scholarship. She has received a Fulbright Scholarship, was elected by Oxford’s St. John’s College to a Visiting Senior Research Fellowship, and was selected as a resident at the Rockefeller Foundation retreat in Bellagio. Professor Gordon has also been the Bacon-Kilkenny Distinguished Visitor at Fordham, a Visiting Fellow at Oxford’s Programme in Comparative Media Law and Policy, and the “Intellectual Property Distinguished Visitor” at the Lewis and Clark Law School. She has twice served as the Chair of the Association of American Law Schools Section on Intellectual Property.
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