Certificate in Intellectual Property

No area of law today is more dynamic than intellectual property law. The growth of e-commerce; new communication technologies and media; biotechnology; and the rise of global markets where goods and services readily flow across national borders have led to rapid changes in the practice of intellectual property law. Attorneys face difficult questions that require creative thinking in a rapidly changing practice environment. The Program in Intellectual Property at the University of Connecticut prepares students to participate in this new information economy. It draws upon the strength of the Law School as the leading public law school in the Northeast United States; the school's commitment to international law, financial services and insurance law; and New England's and Connecticut's significant place in the new economy. Participants in the Intellectual Property Program will be exposed to a broad curriculum of courses-from classes on copyright, trademark, and patent law to specialized seminars, including those in art law, cyberlaw, and European Union intellectual property law.

The Law School at the University of Connecticut is unique in establishing an elective first-year Intellectual Property course and, thereby, allowing students to fashion an individualized curriculum that includes five semesters of intellectual property training. Supervised writing projects and externships create opportunities for an individualized apprenticeship in the field. Outside speakers and conferences, such as the recent Cultural Property Rights Symposium, bring practitioners and policy makers to the Law School. Students who fulfill its requirements, will receive a special certificate at the end of their course of study. There is no application procedure for the certificate program in Intellectual Property. We strongly believe the Law School at the University of Connecticut provides some of the best education available in Intellectual Property Law.

Intellectual Property implicates such diverse subjects as the visual and performing arts; new plant varieties; sports and entertainment; electronic databases; advertising; insulin producing bacteria and recombinant DNA; and video games. Do deceased actors have a right to be used in advertising only with the permission of the estate? Should patent apply to the human genome? And is a parodist permitted to use the trademarks of leading companies? These are among the questions addressed by today's intellectual property law. The faculty of the Intellectual Property Program at Connecticut is committed to a full understanding of the convergences of intellectual property law, combining practice-directed material with public policy concerns, and a strong grounding in the philosophical arguments underlying our legal regimes. Such a comprehensive approach gives students a true appreciation for the ways in which intellectual property attempts to balance the incentive to foster human creativity while at the same time seeking not to unduly restrict its diffusion.

At the core of intellectual property are its traditional regimes: copyright, trademark, and patent, as well as trade secrets, moral rights for artists, and rights of publicity. Since intellectual property is such a dynamic, rapidly changing area of law, many of the cases and statutes discussed in classes are of a quite recent vintage. Globalization has linked the protection of intangibles to trade agreements. As a result, today's practitioner must understand intellectual property law at many levels--its underlying rationales; its multiple regimes and how to employ these strategically within state, federal, and even international jurisdictions; and its evolution in new legislative, judicial and regulatory activities.

Connecticut is at the epicenter of the emerging information economy. Located between Boston's Route 128 and New York's Silicon Alley, it is the home of many of the country's leading technology firms, including United Technologies, Xerox, and General Electric. Four major pharmaceutical companies, including the research facility for the world's largest pharmaceutical, and a cluster of other research institutions, create a robust presence for pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries. Connecticut is the first in the nation in the number of patents issued per capita. It is one of the top ten states in the country for the number of domain names registered. With such a variety of information economy industries; its strong tradition of Yankee ingenuity going back to the Industrial Revolution; and its location in the heart of New England, it is not surprising that Connecticut has recently been ranked one of the five leading states in preparing for the new economy.