Law Commons^™

Intellectual Property Policy Online: A Young Person’S Guide, James Boyle

Faculty Scholarship

This is an edited version of a presentation to the "Intellectual Property Online" panel at the Harvard Conference on the Internet and Society, May 28-31, 1996. The panel was a reminder of both the importance of intellectual property and the dangers of legal insularity. Of approximately 400 panel attendees, 90% were not lawyers. Accordingly, the remarks that follow are an attempt to lay out the basics of intellectual property policy in a straighforward and non-technical manner. In other words, this is what non-lawyers should know (and what a number of government lawyers seem to have forgotten) about intellectual property policy …