Trademark and copyright are important areas of Intellectual Property. Career paths, however, are less obvious than in other areas of IP. How, or should, you pursue a career in trademark and copyright law?

More on Olivia Poppens and Dennis Wilson!

 

 

SPEAKERS

Olivia Poppens, Wayne Stacy, Dennis Wilson

 

Wayne Stacy  00:00

Welcome, everyone to the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology's Career in Tech podcast. I'm your host Wayne Stacy, the Executive Director for BCLT. And today we're talking about careers and trademark and copyright law. So often when people talk about IP, they immediately gravitate toward patents. Trademarks, copyrights, brand protection, content protection are incredibly important areas of the law, and they just don't often get the attention that they deserve. And to talk about these important areas of the law today, we have two experienced attorneys from Kilpatrick Townsend and Stockton joining us. We have Dennis Wilson. Dennis is a partner at Kilpatrick and Townson. And we have Olivia Poppens, who is a Berkeley alumni. So welcome to both of you.

 

Dennis Wilson  00:50

Thanks.

 

Olivia Poppens  00:51

Thanks so much for having us.

 

Wayne Stacy  00:52

So Dennis, what we'll start with you, maybe the best way to explain what a path in brand protection content protection looks like is to tell us what your typical day looks like, what kind of cases do you handle?

 

Dennis Wilson  01:05

So I think goes back to understanding that area of the law a little bit. Copyright law, for example, protects artists expressions. And so the idea is that if you create a song or a video or a book, that we want to encourage that kind of creative output. And so we give those artists the chance to control how that content is distributed. And so you want to, as a society, protect those artists rights. And then at the same time, most of the people listening want to be able to take a clip of the TV show they're watching and text it to their friend or post it online, and they don't want to pay for it. And they want immediate access to everything. And so we have this, this constant balancing of artists rights and users rights. And we see that play out all the time in our clients work. So we look at a filter that's going to be pushed out and developed for a social media platform. And we think about the balancing of does this infringe anyone else's rights? Or does it parody anyone? And is that okay, from a First Amendment protection kind of standpoint. Daily process that we go through is looking at the underlying rights that may be implicated by a new product or service that's being offered, or a new name, or title of a, of a product or movie, and trying to decide whether or not it's fair to use it, or whether it impinges the rights of others. And so it's a constant balancing. And that could be just in advice and counseling and giving people a gut check on whether or not something should go through, or it could be a full kind of litigation analysis. And sometimes that those are the kinds of disputes that we end up litigating, but at their core, it can be, you know, five minute phone calls, two years long litigation, but it all kind of comes down to the same thing.

 

Wayne Stacy  03:09

Did I say I'd love to hear a little bit more about that, that point that in your practice, you end up doing counseling, and a fair amount of counseling, in addition to litigation, where some people may think litigators are just litigato