278.3S sec. 001 - Copyright Law (Summer 2025)
Instructor: Ben W Depoorter (view instructor's teaching evaluations - degree students only)
View all teaching evaluations for this course - degree students only
Units: 3
Grading Designation: Graded
Mode of Instruction: In-Person
Meeting:
MTuWThF 10:10 AM - 12:45 PM
Location: Law 134
From June 03, 2025
To June 24, 2025
Class Number: Click to show Class Number
Enrollment info:
Enrolled: 0
Waitlisted: 0
Enroll Limit: 35
As of: 11/25 02:14 PM
This course provides a survey of U.S. federal copyright law. It will address the constitutional, statutory, and common law aspects of copyright law and explore related rights. The curriculum will involve a study of the objectives of copyright law, criteria for copyright protection, rules for transferring copyright ownership, infringement standards in federal courts, limitations to copyright protection, and available remedies for infringement. Subsequently, the course will evaluate seminal disputes and prevailing themes within primary content industries, such as modern art, television, motion pictures, and software. Current controversies and emergent topics in copyright litigation and legislation related to novel technologies, including Artificial Intelligence, will be explored. The goal is to present a comprehensive and precise exploration of copyright law.
Professor Depoorter is a frequent visiting professor at Berkeley Law, teaching in the LL.M.’s Professional Track. He is also the Max Radin Distinguished Professor at the University of California, San Francisco School of Law, EMLE coordinator at CASLE Ghent University, and Affiliate Scholar at Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet at Society.
Copyright law is one of his major areas of expertise, where Depoorter has investigated a variety of questions relating to enforcement of intellectual property law in the digital era, including whether and how fees-shifting can be used to align incentives between authors in way that promote creativity, how punitive approaches to copyright law adversely impact copyright social norms, and how automated enforcement measures create false positives.
Litigation theory is Depoorter’s other major area of expertise, where he has investigated the strategic pursuit of losing litigation by interest groups that seek to mobilize public and political support, examined the feedback effect of tort settlements on legal precedent, and described the shaping effect of legal uncertainty and court delay.
Recent publications include “When the Remedy is the Wrong: Statutory Damages in the Digital Age”, UCLA Law Review (2019); “The Upside of Losing”, “Fair Trespass”, Columbia Law Review (2014, 2011); “Using Fee Shifting to Promote Fair Use and Fair Licensing”, California Law Review (2015); “Copyright Backlash”, Southern California Law Review (2011); “Law in the Shadow Bargaining: The Feedback Effect of Civil Settlements”, Cornell Law Review (2010); “Technology & Uncertainty: The Shaping Effect on Copyright Law”, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review (2010), and “Liquidated Damages and Moral Hazard: An Experiment”, JITE (2016). His interdisciplinary work on anticommons property is widely cited in American law reviews and international peer-reviewed journals and was featured in a 2010 issue of the New Yorker.
Professor Ben Depoorter completed his studies at Yale Law School (2003, 2009) on a full scholarship from the BAEF. As an Oscar Cox and Olin Fellow at Yale, Depoorter served as an editor of the Yale J. Reg. He was a Santander Research Fellow at U.C. Berkeley and a recipient of a Fulbright scholarship.
Exam Notes: (TH) Take-home examination
(Subject to change by faculty member only through the first two weeks of instruction)
Course Category: Intellectual Property and Technology Law
This course is listed in the following sub-categories:
AI Law and Regulation
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