Associate Professor David S. Levine and Tim McFarlin, a Legal Method and Communication Fellow at Elon Law, presented their scholarship at the 16th Annual Intellectual Property Scholars Conference.
Two Elon Law scholars traveled to Stanford University in August for a conference “designed to facilitate free-ranging discussion” among the top legal and academic minds in the field of intellectual property law.
Associate Professor David S. Levine and Tim McFarlin, a Legal Method and Communication Fellow, each presented at the 16th Annual Intellectual Property Scholars Conference hosted by the Program in Law, Science & Technology at Stanford Law School.
Co-sponsors of the Aug. 11-12 program included the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology at UC Berkeley School of Law; the Intellectual Property Law Program at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University; and the Center for Intellectual Property Law and Information Technology at DePaul University College of Law.
Levine presented “Confidentiality Creep and Dual-Use Secrecy: The Professions in an Age of Information Capture,” which assesses the parameters and challenges of untethered, unsupported and unanalyzed claims of information “confidentiality” – termed “confidentiality creep” – in the development and civilian deployment of drones, aerial robotics, driverless cars and other code-based technologies.
“Confidentiality creep allows emerging technologies to move beyond the ambit of monitoring, regulation and law, creating a space in which the information needed to understand technological activity is held only by those with a vested interest in the technology’s rapid dominance,” Levine writes in his abstract. “Thus, the role of professions that might temper that enthusiasm in the public interest – regulators, civil society activists, lawyers, academics, technologists – can become marginalized.”
Levine is a 2015-2016 Visiting Research Collaborator at Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy. He is also the founder and host of Hearsay Culture on KZSU-FM, an information policy, intellectual property law and technology talk show named as a top five podcast in the ABA’s Blawg 100 of 2008. His scholarship focuses on the operation of intellectual property law at the intersection of technology and public life, specifically information flows in the lawmaking and regulatory process and intellectual property law’s impact on public and private secrecy, transparency and accountability.
McFarlin’s work, “Authorship and Audience Appeal,” looks at the way the size of an audience may soon affect legal disputes over the ownership of intellectual property.
“In one sense, using audience appeal to judge authorship turns traditional notions of creativity on their head,” McFarlin writes in his conference abstract. “But in another sense, audience appeal probes a deeper question that copyright has often missed—is a work with no audience worth protecting?—and so, by analyzing its merits, we can better understand what our society hopes to accomplish with copyright.”
McFarlin’s experience prior to joining Elon Law includes teaching constitutional law, employment law and mock trial courses as an adjunct professor at Washington University in St. Louis and Fontbonne University, and practicing business litigation in the St. Louis metropolitan area. His interests and experiences center on intellectual property law, particularly the areas of copyright and trademark.