By Marketa Trimble, Associate Professor of Law
During the 2014 spring semester the Boyd community benefited from visits by three prominent international intellectual property law scholars – Professors Edouard Treppoz, Seagull Song, and Annette Kur -- who presented their current research to faculty and spoke to three intellectual property classes (see Boyd’s IP curriculum here). Several members of the Nevada Bar Intellectual Property Law Section joined the faculty presentation.
Professor Edouard Treppoz, an expert on intellectual property law and conflict of laws (private international law) from the University of Lyon (Jean Moulin) in France, visited Boyd while serving as a visiting professor at Columbia Law School; his position at Columbia was a return to the school, where he conducted research as a Fulbright Scholar in 1998. Treppoz shared with Boyd his expertise in enforcement of intellectual property within the European Union and discussed the controversial French Hadopi law that aimed at enforcing copyright law on the Internet.
Professor Seagull Song, a Chinese copyright law expert with a profound knowledge of Chinese and U.S. copyright laws, holds law degrees from China (Hong Kong) and the United States (University of California, Berkeley) and practiced law in several jurisdictions in the Asia-Pacific region. Among her professional positions was senior counsel at The Walt Disney Company. Her remarkable understanding of both the Chinese and U.S. perspectives on intellectual property protection means that she is an important bridge in the intellectual property law exchanges between Chinese and U.S. scholars and practitioners as she currently serves as a visiting associate professor at Loyola Law School, Los Angeles. Song presented to Boyd her research on the Chinese motion picture industry and the changes that the industry needs in the Chinese copyright statute.
Professor Dr. Annette Kur is a senior research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition (formerly the Max Planck Institute for Intellectual Property and Competition Law) in Munich, Germany. Her primary research interests center on European and international trademark law and industrial design law. She has also been working on issues at the intersection of intellectual property law and conflict of laws (private international law), one example of which was her service as a consultant to the American Law Institute’s project “Intellectual Property – Principles Governing Jurisdiction, Choice of Law and Judgments in Transnational Disputes.” She visited Boyd during her short and intensive tour of the United States to share her research on copyright law and Internet hyperlinks. Additionally, through Kur’s visit, Boyd students learned about European trademark issues concerning the use of keywords and AdWords on the Internet.
The visits of these three prominent intellectual property experts complement the professional endeavors of the Boyd intellectual property law faculty, Professor Mary LaFrance and Associate Professor Marketa Trimble, who conduct research and write extensively about intellectual property law from comparative and international law perspectives.
