First Sale and Exhaustion Doctrines in IP Conference, Nov. 5, SCU
By Eric Goldman
I’ve mentioned our First Sale and Exhaustion in IP conference before, but now it’s less than 3 weeks away. If you were thinking about coming, now is a good time to confirm your spot.
As regular readers know, first sale issues are swirling around us. On the copyright front, we are working through a troika of Ninth Circuit cases in Vernor v. Autodesk (now subject to an en banc hearing request), UMG v. Augusto and Blizzard v. MDY. I’ve also blogged about some transborder importation cases involving cheap textbooks (e.g., Pearson v. Liu). On the importation topic, the US Supreme Court granted cert in another Ninth Circuit case, Costco v. Omega, and oral arguments are imminent. [UPDATE: I’ve been informed the oral arguments will be on Nov. 8, just a few days after the conference!] And many folks continue to lament the absence of a first sale doctrine for digital files.
On the trademark front, we’ve discussed how manufacturers are battling back against unwanted eBay sales (see Mary Kay v. Weber and Beltronics v. Midwest). Simultaneously, manufacturers are embracing minimum resale prices following the Supreme Court opinion in Leegin. We haven’t blogged too much on patent exhaustion, but the recent Quanta v. LGE Supreme Court ruling casts a large shadow over both patent exhaustion as well as other types of exhaustion. Interwoven into all of these topics are questions about whether statutory first sale/exhaustion rights are waivable or conditionable by contract.
As you can see, we have a lot to talk about.
I’m particularly excited about this conference because that we won’t look at IP exhaustion principles in doctrinal “silos.” Instead, we’ve taken an holistic approach to the topic, so that we can see how the exhaustion principles might be similar and different across the various IPs. We hope this will yield some powerful insights that otherwise would be lost in a silo-by-silo analysis.
Our agenda for the day:
8:15 – 8:45 Registration
8:45 – 9:00 Welcome Remarks
9:00 – 10:20 Justifications for the First Sale/Exhaustion Doctrines
Moderator: Lee Ann Lockridge, Louisiana State University Law Center
Vince Chiappetta, Willamette University College of Law
Anne Layne?Farrar, LECG
Rahul Telang, Heinz College, Carnegie Mellon University
Molly Shaffer Van Houweling, UC Berkeley School of Law
10:20 – 10:40 Break
10:40 – 12:00 Channel Management Issues
Moderator: Mark P. McKenna, Notre Dame Law School
Dale D. Achabal, Santa Clara University
Mary Huser, Bingham McCutchen
Ariel Katz, University of Toronto
Catherine Sandoval, Santa Clara University School of Law
12:00 – 1:10 Lunch
12:40 Mark A. Lemley, Stanford Law School
1:20 – 2:40 Transborder and Comparative Issues
Moderator: Colleen Chien, Santa Clara University School of Law
Frederick M. Abbott, Florida State University College of Law
John A. Rothchild, Wayne State University Law School
Irene Calboli, Marquette University Law School
Cynthia Ho, Loyola University Chicago School of Law
2:40 – 3:00 Break
3:00 – 4:20 Copyright Issues
Moderator: Brian Carver, UC Berkeley School of Information
Neel Chatterjee, Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP
Raymond T. Nimmer, University of Houston Law Center
Tyler T. Ochoa, Santa Clara University School of Law
Jason Schultz, UC Berkeley School of Law
4:20 – 4:30 Closing Remarks – Eric Goldman, Santa Clara University School of Law
4:30 – 5:30 Reception
Please register at the conference page. Hope you can join us on Nov. 5.