Spring 2026
Class meeting last week: Monday and Tuesday 10:30-11:50 a.m.
Office hours last week: (1) Mon, April 27, 1:15-3:15 pm; (2) Tue, April 28, 9:15-10:15 am and 1:15-2:30 pm; (3) Wed, April 29, by appointment in the early morning or late afternoon - send me an email with your preferred method of meeting (in person or Zoom); (4) Thur, April 29, at 10-11 am - Zoom meeting open to entire class - use the link I sent you via email on April 22
Course Description
This course examines international protection of intellectual property. We will discuss international treaties, trade agreement provisions, and dispute resolution systems relating to copyright and neighboring rights, patents, trademarks, and geographical indications. The course will also cover acquisition and enforcement of intellectual property rights in foreign markets.
Required Materials
International Intellectual Property Law and Policy (3d ed. forthcoming 2026) by Graeme B. Dinwoodie, Shira Perlmutter, Graeme Austin, and Rochelle Dreyfuss and additional materials posted in the Files folder in Canvas or included in links below, including certain provisions of the Paris Convention, Berne Convention, TRIPS Agreement, and other treaties and trade agreements covering intellectual property law.
Reading Assignments
Overview and Introduction (Chapter 1)
1/12: (1) Pages 1-30 of Chapter 1 of the Dinwoodie coursebook and (2) the World Intellectual Property Organization’s webpage What is Intellectual Property?, https://www.wipo.int/about-ip/en/
International Law and Institutions (Chapter 2)
1/14: Pages 1-29 of Chapter 2
1/19: Martin Luther King Jr. holiday - no class
1/21: Pages 29-47
Trademark and Unfair Competition Law (Chapter 3)
1/26: Pages 1-25 of Chapter 3 (introduction, different priority rationales, territoriality in trademark law)
1/28: Pages 25-53 (territoriality in trademark law cont'd; trademark treaties) and Art. 4, 6, & 6quinquies of the Paris Convention
2/2: Pages 43-61, 80-93 (territoriality in trademark law cont'd; trademark treaties); Paris Conv. Art. 4, 6, & 6quinquies
2/4 - Kayla Jimenez Guest Lecture on the Madrid Protocol: Filing International Trademark Applications, https://www.wipo.int/en/web/madrid-system/how_to/file/index (review the Overview and The process sections; optional reading: How to file, Classification, and Fees & Payments on this website)
2/9: Pages 62-80, 93-108 (trademark treaties cont'd); Paris Conv. Art. 6bis, Article 16 of TRIPS
2/11: Pages 100-118, 124-138 (trademark treaties cont'd) [skip WIPO Joint Recommendation]; Paris Conv. Art. 10bis
2/16: Pages 138-178 (trademark treaties cont'd); skim TRIPS Art. 15-21
2/18: Pages 171-188 (trademark treaties cont'd); 215-227, 242-256, 285-286 (trademark laws in the European Union and other regions) [skips Section 3.06 Plain Packaging and certain topics in Section 3.07 EU Trademark Law]
2/23: Pages 21-64 of Lisa P. Ramsey, Trademarks and Free Speech: Conflicts and Resolutions (Chapter 1), available on SSRN and through USD's Cambridge Core subscription https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/trademarks-and-free-speech/D3E3ED6806DD91CD5ADFE705AA822C20; Optional reading: Introduction and Chapters 4-5 of the book.
Geographical Indications Law (Chapter 4)
2/25: Pages 1-34 of Chapter 4
3/1 at 9 pm: Essay answer to first practice exam due via email
3/2: Feta tasting; Review answer to first practice exam in class
Patent and Trade Secret Law (Chapter 5)
3/4: Pages 1-32 of Chapter 5 (background on patent protection, territoriality, overview of international agreements, patentable subject matter); skim Paris Convention Articles 2, 4, 4bis, 4ter, 4quater, 5; TRIPS Arts. 1-4, 7-8, 27-34
Optional reading: DLA Piper, Unitary Patent and Unified Patent Court: https://www.dlapiper.com/en-us/insights/topics/unified-patent-court
3/9 and 3/11: Spring break - no class
3/16: Pages 66-77 and 90-107 (available flexibilities of TRIPS; impact of TRIPS obligations on developing and least developed countries) [skips sections on patenting living things and generic material; skips investor state dispute settlement]
3/18: Pages 102-139 (patents and public health cont'd; trade secrets; post-TRIPS developments)
3/23: Patent Law and Artificial Intelligence: (1) Thaler v. Vidal, 43 F.4th 1207 (Fed. Cir. 2022); (2) Congressional Research Service, Artificial Intelligence and Patent Law, Congress.gov (Jan. 12, 2026); (3) DABUS gets its first patent in South Africa under formalities examination, IP Watch Dog (July 29, 2021); (4) Alice Wang, Specialist Chapter: Navigating AI inventorship, patentability and disclosure requirements in China, Europe, and the United States, IAM Media (Aug. 18, 2025); (5) Gustavo Sartori, Guilherme Calazans, & Karina Felix, The Protection of Artificial Intelligence Assisted Inventions: New Brazilian PTO Guidelines, Daniel Law (Feb. 27, 2026); (6) Arti K. Rai, The Reliability Response to Patent Law’s AI Challenges, 59 UC Davis Law Review 97 (Nov. 2025) (the Introduction is required reading (pages 99-104); the remaining pages are optional reading)
Additional optional reading: Ryan Abbott, I Think, Therefore I Invent: Creative Computers and the Future of Patent Law, 57 Boston College Review 1079; Gaétan De Rassenfosse, Adam B. Jaffe & Melissa F. Wasserman, AI-Generated Inventions: Implications for the Patent System, 96 Southern California Law Review 1453 (2024); W. Keith Robertson, When Humans use AI to Earn Patents, Who is Doing the Inventing? The Conversation (March 14, 2025); David L. Schwartz & Max Rogers, Inventorless Inventions? The Constitutional Conundrum of AI-Produced Inventions, 35 Harvard Journal of Law & Technology 531 (2022).
3/25: Matt Bresnahan Guest Lecture on the Patent Cooperation Treaty: (1) Sadhana Chitale, Colm Lawler, & Scott Macfarlane, Understanding the Basics of Patenting, Nature Biotechnology (March 4, 2020)
(2) PCT – The International Patent System (review the sections on How to use the PTC system)
Copyright Law (Chapter 6)
3/30: Pages 1-24, 46-47, 56-61 of Chapter 6 (introduction, territoriality, origins of international copyright law, connecting factors, Berne's scope, national treatment, protected subject matter); Skim the Berne Convention and Articles 9-14 of TRIPS [skips sections 6.07 and 6.08, and parts of 6.09]
4/1: Pages 13-24, 46-47, 56-61, 69-70, 94-99 (material not covered on 3/30, rights protected) [skips parts of section 6.10; skips section 6.11]
4/6: USD holiday
4/8: Pages 103-135 (copyright exceptions and limitations)
4/13: Copyright Law and Artificial Intelligence: Be prepared to discuss whether and when governments should (a) grant copyright rights when a work is created using a generative AI system and (b) conclude that the training of AI-computer programs and/or use of them to create new AI-generated works is copyright infringement or fair use.
(a) Authorship when works are created using generative AI systems
Read/skim these documents: (1) Chinese copyright law: Read summary of the case Li v. Liu (China: Beijing Internet Court Nov. 27, 2023) and Seagull Song, China’s First Case on Copyrightability of AI-Generated Picture, King & Wood (Dec. 7, 2023); (2) U.S. Copyright law: U.S. Copyright Office decision on Jason Allen’s application to register copyright in Théâtre D’opéra Spatial (Sept. 5, 2023) and Edward Lee’s Amicus Brief in Allen v. Perlmutter (Sept. 2, 2025)
Optional reading: (1) Barry Sookman, Copyright in AI Prompts: Chinese Court Ruling on Generative AI and Originality (March 27, 2026) (discussing Chengdu Cultural Communication Co., Ltd v Information Technology (Shanghai) Co., Ltd. 2025) Hu 0101 Min Chu No. 14775 (Nov. 6, 2025); (2) Edward Lee, Vibe Coding Authorship, UCLA L. Rev. Discourse (forthcoming 2026); (3) Christophe Geiger, Elaborating a Human Rights Friendly Copyright Framework for Generative AI, 55 International Review for Intellectual Property and Competition Law 1129 (2024); (4) Jane C. Ginsburg & Luke A. Budiardjo, Authors and Machines, 34 Berkeley Technology Law Journal 343 (2019); (5) Report of the U.S. Copyright Office, Copyright and Artificial Intelligence – Copyrightability (Jan. 29, 2025)
(b) Litigation regarding training of AI systems on the creative works of others
Read/skim these documents: (1) Check out Professor Ed Lee's AI Litigation Tracker: Copyright Suits vs. AI Companies and his maps showing AI litigation around the world as of April 5, 2026 and in the United States as of April 3, 2026 - you can find info about the cases by clicking on the links, or by looking up these cases in George Washington University's Database of AI Litigation; (2) Robert Brauneis, Copyright and the Training of Human Authors and Generative Machines, 48 Columbia Journal of Law and the Arts 1 (2025); (3) Matthew Sag & Peter Yu, The Globalization of Copyright Exceptions for AI Training, 74 Emory Law Journal 1163 (2025); (4) Andres Guadamuz, Victory for GEMA in Germany against Open AI, TechnoLlama (Nov. 22, 2025)
Optional reading: (1) Martin Senftleben, Text and Data Mining, Generative AI, and the Copyright Three-Step Test, 57 International Review of Intellectual Property and Competition Law 67 (2026); (2) Xinyue Liu, Niloofar Mireshghallah, Jane C. Ginsburg, & Tuhin Chakrabarty, Alignment Whack-a-Mole: Finetuning Activates Verbatim Recall of Copyrighted Books in Large Language Models, Columbia Public Law Research Paper (March 20, 2026); (3) Edward Lee, Fair Use and the Origin of AI Training, 63 Hou. L. Rev. 104 (2025); (4) Matthew Sag, Copyright's Jagged Frontier, Duke Law Review (forthcoming 2026); (5) Martin Senftleben, Win-win: How to Remove Copyright Obstacles to AI Training While Ensuring Author Remuneration (and Why the AI Act Fails to Do the Magic), 100 Chicago-Kent Law Review 7 (2025); (6) Report of the U.S. Copyright Office, Copyright and Artificial Intelligence – Generative AI Training (pre-publication) (May 8, 2025); (7) European Parliament, Report on Copyright and Generative Artificial Intelligence - Opportunities and Challenges (March 10, 2026) and Christophe Geiger, Ludovico Bossi, & Francesca Di Lazzaro, The Voss and Jensen Parliamentary Reports on Copyright and Generative AI: A Wrong Step in the Right Direction? Innovation Law and Ethics Observatory Research Paper (April 6, 2026); (8) United Kingdom Department for Science, Innovation and Technology and Department for Culture, Media and Sport, Report on Copyright and Artificial Intelligence (March 18, 2026) (for PDF of entire document click here) and Oliver Fairhurst, UK Report on Copyright and Artificial Intelligence Published, The IPKat (March 18, 2026); (9) Matthew Sag, A Student's Guide to the Law and Policy of AI, Emory Legal Studies Research Paper (Dec. 23, 2025) (chapter providing a foundational introduction to this topic) and Matthew Sag, Copyright Law in the Age of AI (2025) (free textbook with edited versions of cases and a useful discussion of copyright law and AI); (10) BJ Ard, Copyright’s Latent Space: Generative AI and the Limits of Fair Use, 110 Cornell L. Rev. 509 (2025); (11) Katherine Lee, A. Feder Cooper, James Grimmelman, Talkin’ ‘Bout AI Generation: Copyright and the Generative-AI Supply Chain (The Short Version), 3rd ACM Symposium on Computer Science and Law 48 (2024)
Private International Law (Chapter 9)
4/15: Pages 1-25 of Chapter 9 (cross-border adjudication; extra-territorial enforcement of local law - copyright law)
4/20: Pages 25-49 (extra-territorial enforcement of local law - trademark law)
4/22: Pages 50-73 (extra-territorial enforcement of local law - patent and trade secret law; local adjudication of foreign claims - copyright law)
4/27: Pages 73-81, 96-97, 132-142 (local adjudication of foreign claims - copyright law cont'd and trademark law; choice of law)
4/27 at 10 pm: essay answer to second practice exam due to me via email
4/28 (Tuesday): Discuss answer to second practice exam; Course review and opportunity for me to answer your questions before I leave for the UK on 4/30 [note: there are no reading assignments for our last day of class, but be prepared to discuss your essay answer]