By Nicolas Terry
I welcome two excellent guests this week, Jorge Contreras and Mark Lemley.
Our discussion begins with broad questions regarding the role of intellectual property in both promoting innovation and protecting against fakes during the pandemic.
We take a look at how governments do or do not free up IP during difficult times, the role of the World Intellectual Property Organization in assuring ready access to medicines and technologies in less well developed countries, and how U.S. companies themselves are changing their approaches to enforcing their IP rights. In particular, my guests talk about the Open COVID Pledge that they are involved with.
Jorge Contreras is a professor of law at the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law. There he teaches in the areas of intellectual property law, property law and genetics and the law. He has edited six books and published more than 100 scholarly articles and book chapters. He has recently been named one of the University of Utah’s Presidential Scholars, and won his school’s 2018-19 Faculty Scholarship Award.
Mark Lemley is the William H. Neukom Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and the Director of the Stanford Program in Law, Science and Technology. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research and as affiliated faculty in the Symbolic Systems program. He teaches intellectual property, patent law, trademark law, antitrust, the law of robotics and AI, video game law, and remedies. He is the author of eight books and 179 articles, including the two-volume treatise IP and Antitrust.
The Week in Health Law Podcast from Nicolas Terry is a commuting-length discussion about some of the more thorny issues in health law and policy. Subscribe at Apple Podcasts or Google Play, listen at Stitcher Radio, Spotify, Tunein or Podbean.
Show notes and more are at TWIHL.com. If you have comments, an idea for a show or a topic to discuss you can find me on Twitter @nicolasterry or @WeekInHealthLaw.
