Do Not Delete
11/20/2015 3:10 PM
INTRODUCTION
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY & INFORMATION
LAW IN A GLOBAL CONTEXT
Greg R. Vetter
The 2015 IPIL/Houston National Conference is the fourteenth
installment of the event. For the second time over these years, the
resulting scholarship purposefully focuses on international
intellectual property,1 a field of increasing importance and
prominence for the United States and its legal academy in
intellectual property and information law. The 2015 National
Conference and the associated publication of the symposium
articles correspond with the twentieth anniversary of the
Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property
Rights (TRIPS).2 These considerations frame the accomplishments
 Law Foundation Professor, Professor of Law; Co-Director, Institute for
Intellectual Property & Information Law (IPIL); and Organizer/Moderator, 2015
IPIL/Houston National Conference. See www.gregvetter.org. This annual conference, and
IPIL’s other events throughout the year, are made possible by the continuing commitment
of UHLC Dean Leonard M. Baynes; the support of my colleagues, Paul Janicke, Craig Joyce,
Raymond T. Nimmer, Sapna Kumar, and Jacqui Lipton; IPIL’s capable program director,
Sindee Bielamowicz; our continuing partnership with the Houston Law Review (whose
Editors in Chief have attended each of the conferences since the project’s founding); and
the generous support of the international law firms and corporations represented on the
Institute’s distinguished Advisory Council. To all of them, I express my own, and IPIL’s,
great appreciation.
1. The event in 2009 considered Intellectual Property in International Perspective. See
Intellectual Property in International Perspective (2009), IPIL NAT’L CONF.,
http://www.law.uh.edu/ipil/symposium/prior/2009.html (last visited Nov. 20, 2015). The
upcoming 2016 event, entitled Authorship in America (and Beyond), will mark the fifteenth time
IPIL has brought scholars together in the unique way provided by the IPIL/Houston National
Conference. See IPIL NAT’L CONF., www.ipilsymposium.org (last visited Nov. 20, 2015).
2. Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, Apr. 15,
1994, Marrakesh Agreement Establishing the World Trade Organization, Annex 1C, 1869
U.N.T.S. 299; see WORLD TRADE ORG., THE MAKING OF THE TRIPS AGREEMENT xiii
(Jayashree Watal & Antony Taubman eds., 2015), https://www.wto.org/english/res_e/
booksp_e/trips_agree_e/history_of_trips_nego_e.pdf.
333
Do Not Delete
334
11/20/2015 3:10 PM
HOUSTON LAW REVIEW
[53:2
of our invited scholars and their participation at the IPIL/Houston
National Conference.
The work of these remarkable scholars is set forth in this 2015
Symposium Issue, Intellectual Property & Information Law in a
Global Context, of the Houston Law Review. This Issue continues
a highly productive collaboration between the Review and the
University of Houston Law Center’s Institute for Intellectual
Property and Information Law (IPIL).
Each year IPIL brings together, for the IPIL/Houston
National Conference, internationally recognized scholars to
explore a particular subject within intellectual property or
information law. The 2015 Conference was held on Friday and
Saturday, May 29–30, 2015, in Santa Fe, New Mexico.3 The event’s
goal is to provide a small-group, seminar-course-style discussion
of the papers in a locale that is both enjoyable and inspirational.
The in-depth review and conversation about the scholarship
is unparalleled. It is intimate in a professional and beneficial way.
I tremendously enjoyed hearing these scholars present their works
in Santa Fe in May 2015. Each draft article receives an hour for
feedback and discussion from the dozen or so persons in the room,
with a goal of receiving the highest quality feedback from
participants who have carefully studied the draft articles in
advance. Given the group assembled for the 2015 National
Conference, I am honored to briefly introduce the resulting
scholarship as reported in this Symposium Issue.
With a perspective informed, first, by his stature as one of the
most prominent international intellectual property scholars of his
generation, and second, by his attending the Diplomatic
Conference of May 2015 to revise the Lisbon Agreement for the
Protection of Appellations of Origin and Their International
Registration, in Irreconcilable Differences? The Geneva Act of the
Lisbon Agreement and the Common Law,4 Daniel Gervais relates
the challenges in establishing an international registry for
geographic indications (GIs). TRIPS obligates member states to
negotiate toward a GI registration system, but progress has been
lacking. The Lisbon Agreement provides a GI registry system, and
the Geneva Act revisions hoped to alter it for greater use. But
3. In addition to the Conference Presenters and contributors whose papers appear
here, the 2015 gathering in Santa Fe benefited greatly from the insightful participation of
our three Conference Fellows: Leah Chan Grinvald, Suffolk University Law School; Patricia
Judd, Washburn University School of Law; and Eric Priest, University of Oregon School of
Law.
4. Daniel Gervais, Irreconcilable Differences? The Geneva Act of the Lisbon
Agreement and the Common Law, 53 HOUS. L. REV. 339 (2015).
Do Not Delete
2015]
11/20/2015 3:10 PM
INFORMATION LAW IN A GLOBAL CONTEXT
335
critical mass may be difficult to achieve given the provisions
discussed by Professor Gervais that may inhibit common law
jurisdictions, such as the United States, from joining.
Continuing the conference’s self-emerging emphasis on GIs,
in Time to Say Local Cheese and Smile at Geographical Indications
of Origin? International Trade and Local Development in the
United States,5 Irene Calboli provides a persuasive account of
middle-ground positions to help the United States and Europe
reconcile long-standing differences on the scope of GI protection.
Her treatment first considers the global political economy
questions, such as European extension of its preferred, heightened
GI-protection approach to other countries through bilateral and
multilateral trade agreement pressure. Professor Calboli then
articulates the political economy considerations internal to the
United States, with insights about how to break logjams in
thinking among stakeholders toward some acceptance of GIs (of
moderate strength) with attendant benefits for local producers.
Originating a wonderfully clever proposal, in Tracermarks: A
Proposed Information Intervention,6 Margaret Chon proposes the
tracermark: a hybrid mechanism that has characteristic elements
from trademarks and GIs, with potential implications for
copyright and Internet law. In her telling, Professor Chon starts
with this insight:
[My] primary normative claim is that increasing the
traceability and transparency of more objectively verifiable
information will greatly benefit . . . global transactions
involving IP-protected goods and services—thus promoting
global social welfare.7
Professor Chon’s tracermark is a new legal device to facilitate
the generation and conveyance of “traceable, transparent, and
verifiable information”8—that is, smart information about goods and
services. She develops the theory underlying the need for the
tracermark and sketches its implementation, with an extremely
adept eye toward the theoretical innovations she brings and a skillful
tailoring for the practical eventualities of tracermark deployment.
Completing the National Conferences’ transition away from
trademark law into copyright, with a vantage owing to his many
5. Irene Calboli, Time to Say Local Cheese and Smile at Geographical Indications of
Origin? International Trade and Local Development in the United States, 53 HOUS. L. REV.
373 (2015).
6. Margaret Chon, Tracermarks: A Proposed Information Intervention, 53 HOUS. L.
REV. 421 (2015).
7. Id. at 422.
8. Id. at 423.
Do Not Delete
336
11/20/2015 3:10 PM
HOUSTON LAW REVIEW
[53:2
decades of path-breaking scholarship, advocacy, and activism
toward injecting social justice goals into intellectual property and
information law, in Copyright and Social Justice in the Digital
Information Society: “Three Steps” Toward Intellectual Property
Social Justice,9 Lateef Mtima models a framework to evaluate “the
unauthorized use of intellectual property in the cause of social
justice.”10 As he further explains:
The invocation of non-IP law in order to balance competing
intellectual property rights and interests offers a foundation
for constructing standards for evaluating IP social justice
claims and objectives. By anchoring IP social justice-oriented
claims to specific laws and express governmental policies,
social justice advocates ground their arguments in society’s
collective and verifiable social objectives, and not merely the
views or agenda of individual clients or interest
groups. . . . [This can help courts] develop standards for
achieving digital copyright and other intellectual property
social justice and will [help courts] employ and supplement
the principal copyright social balancing mechanisms of fair
use and fair dealing and copyright limitations . . . .11
Finally transitioning to a topic that is last in the order of my
introduction, but certainly not least in terms of change and
importance to the global IP system, in Patentable Subject Matter
as a Policy Driver,12 Amy Landers persuasively argues for a
number of policy guideposts to heighten the quality of interpretive
jurisprudence for patentable subject matter. Noting the
counter-productive focus of the U.S. Supreme Court’s emphasis on
exclusions from what is an invention that falls into the patent
system as eligible subject matter, Professor Landers’s approach
would refocus on the goals of the patent system. Her policy
guideposts are worthy of restatement here:
(1) fostering scientific creativity; (2) encouraging the
creation of an infrastructure; (3) balancing the patent
system with free competition concerns; and (4) considering
current social needs.13
Professor Landers’s progression to these policy guideposts
includes comparative law treatment concerning how other nations
treat patentable subject matter, along with a historical review of
9. Lateef Mtima, Copyright and Social Justice in the Digital Information Society:
“Three Steps” Toward Intellectual Property Social Justice, 53 HOUS. L. REV. 459 (2015).
10. Id. at 464.
11. Id. at 464.
12. Amy L. Landers, Patentable Subject Matter as a Policy Driver, 53 HOUS. L. REV.
505 (2015).
13. Id. at 507.
Do Not Delete
2015]
11/20/2015 3:10 PM
INFORMATION LAW IN A GLOBAL CONTEXT
337
U.S. law leading to the current doctrinal quagmire. A key judicial
insight from her work is that “[i]mplementing policy requires
making choices. Currently, patent doctrine floats above the fray
without engaging with these questions or the consideration of
articulated real world consequences.”14
As the recent revisions in U.S. law relating to patentable
subject matter can attest, the past fourteen years have been
eventful and times of change in intellectual property law. The past
fourteen IPIL/Houston National Conference events have been a
source of tremendous professional enjoyment and satisfaction. It
is with appreciation and pride that I recommend to the academy
the works of these tremendous scholars in this 2015 Symposium
Issue of the Houston Law Review.
14.
Id. at 512.