Conference Announcement: A 15 Year Retrospective of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, SCU, March 15

February 11, 2013 · by · in Copyright, Derivative Liability

By Eric Goldman

On March 15, 2013 at Santa Clara University, the High Tech Law Institute is hosting a conference entitled “A 15 Year Retrospective of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.” Our co-sponsors include the advisory committee to the Congressional Internet Caucus, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Fenwick & West.

This event follows the basic formula from our popular 2011 conference, a 15 year retrospective of 47 USC 230. Like that conference, our goal is to appraise the DMCA’s legacy and effect after 15 years in the field. To do so, we are bringing some key players from the DMCA’s birth, such as Bruce Lehman (who wrote the influential Green and White Papers), Judge Whyte (who decided the precedent-setting RTC v. Netcom case) and Jay Monahan (who helped build eBay’s VeRO program before the DMCA was on the books). We’re also bringing in folks who are dealing with cutting-edge DMCA issues today. My hope is that we’ll walk away from the event with a better perspective of how we got here, what worked/what didn’t, and what lessons we can learn from the DMCA as we continue to build copyright policy in the digital millennium.

We anticipate spending the morning on 1201 and the afternoon on 512. My colleague Tyler Ochoa will talk about 1202 in the morning. At this point, I think it’s unlikely we’ll cover music streaming (114), computer repair (117) or vessel hull designs (1301 et seq), even though all of them are interesting. Some of our speakers who discuss the DMCA generally may touch on them. We hope to post a more specific hour-by-hour schedule in the next week or two.

As usual, we keep our registration prices low, and we have numerous discounted or free registration categories. We anticipate offering California CLE once we sort out the hour-by-hour schedule. We anticipate strong demand for the event, so register today to save your seat today.

If you’re an academic and interested in coming to the DMCA conference, note that the next day (March 16) we’re having an Internet Law academic work-in-progress conference. We’re putting new speaking requests on a waitlist, but we have room for additional discussants.