Propertizing Intangibles Upper-Level Reading Group

This reading group will explore the changes that laws dealing with intangibles have gone through in the digital age, focusing in particular on copyright. For example, digital rights management (DRM) emerged as a response to the erasure of physical constraints on copying brought about by digital technologies. More recently, data firms have found innovative ways to propertize and monetize data despite its intangibility and ambiguity around its copyrightability and patentability. These changes have long-lasting implications for how we think about property and how that’s reflected in the law and in its governance of intangibles. We will explore these themes through a mixture of academic and popular materials.

The group is led by JSD candidates Kat Geddes and Stav Zeitouni and will meet four times over the spring semester, on Wednesdays, 4:30-6:00 PM: 2/1, 3/1, 3/29, 4/19