A new law course designed for the USC Mark & Mary
Stevens Institute for Technology Commercialization (SITeC) curriculum
begins in spring.
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Jennifer Urban of the USC Gould School designed and will teach SITeC-oriented Law 599x
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Jennifer Urban of the USC Gould
Law School created Law 599x, “Intellectual Property Law for Engineers and
Scientists,” specifically for SITeC. She designed it, she wrote, to
teach “engineers, scientists and other inventors … what you need to
know about patents, copyrights, trade secrets and trademarks in order
to protect your inventions and add value to your USC degree.”
The three-credit course, taught in a combination of lectures and
interactive format, will be available totally online via the Viterbi
School’s innovative Distance Education Network.
It targets engineers and scientists but is open to all USC graduate
students. Gould Law School students, however, cannot take it for
credit. It will count toward SITeC’s newly initiated Graduate
Certificate in Engineering Technology Commercialization.
Founded in November 2004 by a $22 million donation from USC alumnus and
venture capitalist Mark Stevens, SITeC enrolled its first students,
graduate and undergraduate, in the fall, 2005 semester.
“We have long been working closely with the USC Marshall School of
Business,” Peter Beerel, an associate professor in the USC Viterbi
School of Engineering who is SITeC’s faculty director of educational
programs. “We are delighted that the Gould School is now broadening our
scope in an area that is critical to our mission.”
Urban’s prospectus lays out the background of the course.
“Intellectual property—patents, trademarks, copyrights and trade
secrets—is in the news. IBM has decided use some of its patents
‘defensively.’ Grokster and other peer-to-peer companies’ future are in
question after a recent Supreme Court decision. Lexmark has been told
by a court that it can’t successfully sue a small company that makes
competing printer cartridges for its printers. Google is under fire for
its advertisement program. IP is in the tech press, the business press
and the entertainment pages. Why? Because IP has made the technology
revolution possible. When you take your product to a venture capitalist
or to the VP of Development, they want to know: what intellectual
property coverage can we get? IP is the way that inventors and creators
obtain “property” protection for their work, and avoiding the IP of
competitors is crucial to an engineer’s ability to design a new product
that is marketable.
“Most inventors are familiar with the concept of a patent, but the
process for obtaining a patent is complicated and non-intuitive,” Urban
continues. “Further, many inventors do not think about all the other
kinds of intellectual property, each of which is important: copyrights
can protect computer software and are the basis of open source
licenses; trade secrets protect everything from inventions to customer
lists; and trademarks are used to build the goodwill of the business
and branding.
“As such, Law 599x will cover the basics of all of these types of
intellectual property, from a practical technology business
perspective. IP, of course, doesn’t only protect your inventions—it
protects everyone else’s inventions, too. How do you avoid infringing
the IP of others? When do you have to worry about what your customers
do with your product? We will cover the basics of infringement, as
well, and discuss how to avoid opening yourself or your company up to a
lawsuit.”
More information on the course is available SITeC web site at
http://viterbi.usc.edu/sitec. DEN availability is described at
http://den.usc.edu.