Professor Kal Raustiala and Professor Chris Sprigman

Monday April 3, 2006
12:30-1:30 PM
Room 280A
Stanford Law School
Open to All
Lunch Served

The music, film, book, and software industries enforce their copyrights against pirates. But in the much larger global fashion industry, copyright does not protect most original apparel designs, and design "piracy" is a way of life. Why are the rules about copying seemingly so different in the fashion industry? And why is there so little apparent effort by the industry to change those rules?

Chris Sprigman (Univ. of Virginia School of Law) and Kal Raustiala (UCLA Law School) argue that copying functions as an important element of - and perhaps even a necessary predicate to - the fashion industry's swift cycle of innovation. Raustiala and Sprigman examine the creative dynamics of the apparel industry. But they also hope to spark further exploration of a fundamental question of IP policy: to what degree are IP rights necessary to induce investment in innovation? Does the piracy paradox occur only in the fashion industry, or are stable low-IP equilibria imaginable in other content industries as well?About the speakers: Chris Sprigman teaches intellectual property law, antitrust law, competition policy, and comparative constitutional law at the University of Virgina School of Law. His scholarship focuses on how legal rules affect innovation and the deployment of new technologies. Kal Raustiala holds a joint appointment between the UCLA Law School and the UCLA Program on Global Studies, a multidisciplinary undergraduate program on globalization. He teaches courses on international law and international relations.