Intellectual Property Survey, Fall 2007

Course Description

This course covers domestic intellectual property laws - patent, copyright, trademark, and trade secret - through statues and cases. It is designed to afford the student who intends to practice in other areas an acquaintance with key IP issues, principles and doctrine, and to provide the intellectual property and information law specialist an introduction to the overall subject. The course will provide roughly equal treatment of patent, copyright and trademark law, approximately four weeks for each, with the remainder applied to the law of trade secrets, introduction, and/or review.

Generally Applicable Syllabus Information

Please read carefully the Generally Applicable Syllabus Information. This document sets forth course policy for attendance, preparation and participation, use of computers, examination and grading, and other items. A complete understanding of this document is necessary to take full meaning from the Class Schedule and Other Information set forth immediately below.

Class Schedule and Other Information

Contact Information and Office Hours

These are posted on my home page at:

www.law.uh.edu/faculty/gvetter/

Course Coverage Table

The tables immediately below provide the detailed assignments for this course. It also may provide links to materials for each class and other items related to the course. In order to allow flexibility in the class, assignments beyond those posted for the next week are subject to change; therefore, students who may wish to read ahead are urged to contact the professor before doing so. The rate of progress through the modules depends on the class dynamics.

Class presentation slides are provided as links below in association with each module title. I will generally have the slides available about a week before we start a new module. If students want hardcopy of the slides for use during class, please download and print the linked slides file.

After each class session, the class date will become a hyperlink to the audio for that class.

The casebook makes liberal use of "problems" - which in many cases are fact patterns adopted from actual cases. The problems' purpose is to illustrate twists in doctrine and provide additional context. When a problem is included in the assigned reading, there is no reason to write out an answer to the problem. Rather, it is sufficient to think about the problem and if desired make a few notes. Problems in the assigned reading may be the focus of class discussion, but will not always be touched upon in class.

Case names are listed in the table below as assignments. Sometimes there are several paragraphs of introduction before the case when the case is the lead case in a new subheading in the book. These introductory paragraphs are part of the assignment and should be read along with the case.

The call group assignment list will be posted here for downloading as a .pdf file, with a password required to open the file. That password will be given out in class.

In the table each casebook assignment is given a page range to go with the assignment title. Unless the "Comment/Note" column indicates otherwise, read the entire assignment, encompassed on the indicated pages, including any notes or associated problems.